Well, we've been away for two weeks, and those two weeks were just chock-full of political news, so we've got a lot to cover. The reason for the interruption in columns was, of course, our attending Netroots Nation, the yearly conclave of bloggers, Progressives, and all and sundry who like hanging out with them. Which brings us to this week's unusual title -- today's Friday Talking Points, for the first time ever, are going to be professionally-produced and focus-group-tested. More on this later.

We've got a lot to cover, so we're going to do it very quickly here, but I have to begin by pointing out, once again, what a helium-brain David Gregory truly is. The moderator of Meet The Press is a journalistic lightweight on his best of days -- even when some interviewee breaks some real news on his show, Gregory can be counted on to not realize such news has been made, at least until someone else informs him of the fact. The man couldn't think his way out of a paper bag, although he does have that boyish grin and good hair going for him -- which is all that really matters to NBC.

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They wanted 70, and they got 68. I speak, of course, of the "yea" votes in the Senate on the immigration bill this afternoon. In the political world we occupy today, that is nothing short of astounding. Not only did all 54 Democrats stand together, but 14 Republicans also voted in favor of the bill. That's 10 more than were in the original group which put together the proposal. Which, as I said, is truly astounding in this partisan day and age.

Is the bill perfect? Well, no. But then keep in mind that no bill ever is. Will it do more good than harm? As written, the answer seems to be an unqualified "yes." Sure, Democrats had to toss in 20,000 Border Patrol agents (a doubling of the force) at the cost of $30 billion, but they had to let the Republicans spend a bunch of money to get them on board. Democrats allowed the Republicans to prove once again that their denouncements of deficit spending always ring hollow when it comes to things Republicans want to spend money on. Thirty billion dollars is a cheap price to pay, though, since the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill will save over $900 billion from the federal budget over the next two decades.

I've been following the progress of the immigration debate all year, and have to say that the hurdle the Senate cleared today was monumental. Not only did the bill pass, but it passed with substantial bipartisan support. What other contentious issue has passed the Senate recently with 68 votes, after all? None that spring to my mind, that's for sure. It appears there are at least 14 Republican senators who realize that their party's future could hang in the balance, and voted in favor of all those aspiring to be United States citizens. The Senate has laid out a clear roadmap to citizenship, which will benefit millions. And they did it with 30 percent of the Republicans in the Senate voting for it.

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Today, my marriage to my wife did not change one iota. Our marriage does not need "protecting" or "defending" by anyone -- it is exactly the same today as it was yesterday. Tomorrow, it will remain the same. Contrary to the claims of opponents, the Supreme Court's landmark rulings on the two cases before it involving the rights of gay people to get married has had and will have no effect whatsoever upon my marriage.

That may sound like a strange place to begin the celebration over the Supreme Court's rulings in Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor, but it's a key point if only because it has been used as such an erroneous argument in favor of banning marriage equality. No heterosexual's right to marry the person of their choice is any different now than it was yesterday -- proving the opposition wrong on one of their main arguments (consider the name of the federal law, for proof of this: "Defense Of Marriage Act"). But the whole argument over marriage equality is so personal, I thought I'd start with my own personal take on it: the sun will rise tomorrow, I will be married to the same wonderful woman, and nothing will have changed. Nothing.

However, for a whole lot of gay couples, life will have gotten one whale of a lot better. Today's Supreme Court rulings are a giant leap forward along the path to fully equal rights. The federal government will now recognize marriages which their states recognize, and the barriers to equal treatment under federal law have disintegrated for good. That is indeed something to celebrate. Which is why I'm going to stop using the term "gay marriage" ever again in my writing. There is no "same-sex" and "opposite-sex" marriage anymore. There is just marriage, period. From now on, the phrase I'll be using is "marriage equality," because we're all now equal under federal law -- as we should be under state law, as well.

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The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision today, striking down part of the Voting Rights Act. In essence, the court told Congress to come up with a better formula to determine which jurisdictions will have to pre-clear changes to their voting laws (because the old formula is outdated). This has caused much consternation and outcry, but what was notable was that the court did not throw out the concept of preclearance itself.

As a practical matter, though, no state or county will have to be precleared as of now. Until Congress updates the formula, voting laws can change anywhere in the country without the approval of the Justice Department.

Fans of the Voting Rights Act -- the ones decrying today's decision -- should now be concentrating on pressuring Congress to act. A better law is needed, and Congress can indeed be forced by public opinion to pass a new formula.

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This is an article about Paula Deen, racism, and the upcoming gay marriage decisions from the Supreme Court. But mostly it's an article about the long, slow road to true changes in American society. The beginning of this road always starts with the prevailing casual acceptance of bigotry and prejudice in everyday life, and the road doesn't end until society as a whole reaches the point of near-universal condemnation of a way of thinking which used to be widespread and unremarkable.

Paula Deen is currently in the news for her racist language and racist thinking. She is a television celebrity chef, or at least she used to be before her show was unceremoniously cancelled last week. What brought this on was a deposition taken in a court case where Deen is being sued by employees of her restaurant. In it, Deen admits to using racist language, specifically saying the "N-word." Other stories are coming to light about her general attitudes on racial relations, both in the present day and in the antebellum South.

While there are plenty who are condemning Deen over what has so far been reported, there is also a groundswell of support for her, using what could be called the "older Southerners will be older Southerners" defense. Deen, this explanation tells us, comes from a different generation and therefore was raised in a different world than that which exists today. Those condemning Deen counter that this should not matter, since (to give but one obvious example) Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary later this year. How long does the woman need, for Pete's sake, to realize times have changed?

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Program Note

This is the last of the re-run columns for the week, and it is the oldest. I wrote this in early 2010 (before the election), right when Arizona had passed a sweeping anti-immigrant law. A portion of this law was struck down just this week in the Supreme Court, making it an interesting and relevant look back.

It's also perhaps the most comprehensive writing I've ever done on the subject, which is another reason why it's worth reading again. Some of the facts on the ground have changed (unemployment is more than two points lower than the "9.9 percent" cited in the article, for instance), but the underlying debate really hasn't. What has truly changed is the political situation of the Republican Party. After George W. Bush reached a high point in the Latino vote (getting over 40 percent) in his two elections, the Republican Party may not see numbers this good for a generation. Mitt Romney only pulled in 27 percent of the Latino vote in 2012. Smart Republicans are worried about this trend, because of what it means for their chances of ever re-taking the White House from the Democrats. Parochial Republicans (mostly in the House), however, are much more concerned with assuaging their constituents' angst over Latinos. Meaning the fight on the Senate floor is just the beginning of what could turn out to be a very ugly power struggle.

There really are no easy answers to be found in the political realm. The Republicans have centered their efforts over a "trigger" which will stop the path to citizenship until ever-more-unrealistic goals can be certified. The Democrats have successfully made the "path to citizenship" itself the centerpiece of their efforts. The Border Patrol is now the most expensive and extensive federal police force in existence -- it is bigger than the Drug Enforcement Agency, bigger than the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and -- stunningly -- bigger than the Federal Bureau of Investigations itself. Think about that for a moment. Our federal policing priorities already are more heavily weighted towards policing the border than fighting every other type of federal crime.

I've always said if we really decided to make the southern border impenetrable it would be possible to do so. It would also, however, be prohibitively expensive. We could hire enough guards to stop each and every border-crosser, but by doing so we might wind up with the Border Patrol being bigger than the Pentagon. It would cost an obscene amount of money, but it is in no way outside the realm of possibility. The question is how far down this road we as a people want to go. And what price we are willing to pay to get there.

Anyway, this is my final thought this week on the subject of immigration. Fresh, new columns will return on Monday. Thanks for your patience in dealing with my summer re-run season in the meantime.

[Originally published May 13, 2010]

Arizona is a truly beautiful state. It has many spectacular sights, of which the Grand Canyon is the most awe-inspiring. But Arizona is also a state of forbidding landscapes -- much of the state is desert or near-desert, where the heat of the midday sun is a force of nature to be heavily respected, if not downright feared. But what has put Arizona into the news recently is its "forbidding" political landscape. Specifically, on immigration.

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Program Note

This is a stunningly-optimistic column I wrote at the end of January. As you'll see, I predict a better than 8-in-10 chance of comprehensive immigration reform becoming law this year. Now that roughly half the year has already passed, I still remain incredibly (but, perhaps, no longer "stunningly") optimistic about the chances that we'll see President Obama sign some sort of bill before we ring in the new year.

At the present time, I would revise my prediction downwards, but only slightly. I still put the chances of comprehensive immigration reform -- complete with a "path to citizenship" -- at about 70-75 percent. That's still pretty rosy-colored optimistic, I realize, at this point.

But take a look at how I read the political landscape five months ago. It's still fairly accurate, although Marco Rubio has been battered a lot more than I would have expected, at this point in the process. Even so, I still remain overwhelmingly optimistic. Call me a starry-eyed fool if you must....

A lot of the reasons why my position hasn't changed much is that not much has actually happened in Congress. I did think we'd be a lot further down the road, by this point, I will fully admit. A bill has made it out of committee and survived the first filibuster attempt to make it onto the floor of the Senate. I expected this about mid-February, or maybe as late as March. Such is the glacial pace of Washington.

But still... but still... the chances of such sweeping legislation's actually becoming reality are still better this year than they have been in quite a while. There are two major power brokers pushing for such a bill from within the Republican power structure: the "establishment" Republicans (who can read demographics and accurately predict future Electoral College chances for the next generation); and "Big Business" (who want a cheap labor supply, and don't particularly care about the politics behind achieving this goal). Those are some pretty powerful puppet-string-pullers, and I'm still betting that when push comes to shove, they'll be the ones calling the shots. I could be wrong, as always, but I'm still feeling 70-75 percent optimistic, so make of that what you will.

[Originally published January 29, 2013]

Does comprehensive immigration reform have a chance of becoming law in 2013?

This is the question all pundits are asking themselves this particular week, so I thought I'd give my thoughts, here at the beginning of what will likely be a long and drawn-out debate. I start out optimistic, personally, and put the chance that sweeping, inclusive immigration reform will happen at a healthy 80-85 percent.

As I said, that's pretty optimistic. It will be subject to change, as the glaciated wheels of the legislative process clank and clunk forward, ever-so-slowly, over the upcoming months. With the twists and turns of Congress which await, I'm sure there'll be times when I offer up much more pessimistic predictions of actual passage, but for now I'm comfortable with 80-85 percent.

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Program Note

OK, I know I semi-promised (yesterday) that there would be a new column today, but while reviewing columns for Thursday and Friday I actually came up with three good former columns on the subject of immigration -- a subject now being hotly debated in the Senate. What I would have written about today (instead) is the rampant hypocrisy of the Republicans, vis-à-vis the CBO report just out which shows that the Senate immigration bill would actually reduce the deficit by close to $200 billion in the first ten years, and something like $700 billion in the following decade -- versus the Republicans' insistence that deficit and debt reduction is their party's highest priority. That column will have to wait until next week, I suppose.

For now, and for the rest of the week, I'm presenting three repeat columns on the subject of reforming immigration. I'll be doing this out of chronoligical order -- today's column actually ran one day after the column I've got teed up for tomorrow. Both ran at the beginning of this year, when pundits were busily estimating the chances of comprehensive immigration reform actually becoming a legislative reality this year. After half a year, I thought it was worth a look back at my initial takes on the subject.

Today's column deals almost exclusively with some historical aspects of tackling the subject, and tomorrow's column deals with my estimation of the chances of success for such legislation this year (complete with an introduction which updates my rash prediction). Then for Friday, I dipped a little deeper into the archives for a column I initially wrote in 2010, right after the Arizona anti-immigrant law passed (part of which was struck down by the Supreme Court this week, making it relevant once again). It's a more sweeping and non-political look at the entire subject, which is why I saved it for Friday rather than presenting it in chronological order. Anyway, that's the lineup for the rest of the week, unless I get random bursts of energy during the Netroots Nation conference and decide to "live-blog" what's going on. Once again, next Monday, regular (new) columns will resume on schedule.

[Originally published January 30, 2013]

We stand at the beginning of a grand debate on immigration. America goes through these grand debates every generation or so, and what remains constant is that both sides in the fight can be counted upon to accuse the other side of "playing politics" with the immigration issue. This has, indeed already begun.

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Call me biased, I suppose. Biased against ignorance, perhaps. To be less snarky, biased in favor of geography and Irish people. I am so biased in favor of Irish people, in fact, that I married one. So I guess I'm not the best neutral observer. But having fully admitted that, I still feel duty-bound to point out how last night's NBC News broadcast made a basic and truly ignorant geographical mistake, as anchor Brian Wilson read the lead-in to a story on President Obama's overseas conference with the Gang of Eight (no, not that Gang of Eight... meant to say "the G-8," sorry...) over in Northern Ireland.

As is their wont, because the story dealt with another part of the world, NBC News did the "zoomey map" thing to educate Americans just where the heck they were talking about. It started by showing a goodly chunk of the planet, centered on Western Europe:

All fine and good. OK, that's Europe. Got it. Where are we zooming to today? Well, as we fly downward into a more-detailed map, we see a country "light up" into bright green:

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Just for fun, today I'd like to use my column to skate perilously close to the edge of rampant paranoia. I'm really doing this to make an ironic point, at the end, but I can't deny that this type of thing is certainly fun to write. Especially when I'm stating up front that what we'll be exploring is territory only those in tinfoil hats usually set foot in.

A short history of such tinfoil hattery in American popular culture is in order, though, to begin with. Because before the shiny and crinkly hats even appeared, there has long been a paranoid streak in America, especially at the movies. The most memorable early example (to me) was General Jack D. Ripper, from the darkly humorous Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Ripper was convinced that the Soviets had hatched an evil plot to infiltrate Americans' "precious bodily fluids" through the introduction of fluoride into our water supply. If that sounds dangerously paranoid, well, that's because it is. Even more dangerous, since Ripper was commander of an air base and ordered a pre-emptive attack on the Soviets by his nuclear-armed bombers.

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