The Accidental Invasion

In the vein of Switzerland's accidental invasion of Liechtenstein last year, and the British attacking a Spanish fishing town a few years prior to that, now we see that the Mexicans have wandered across our very own southern border:

Seven members of the Mexican military were found inside the United States on Friday, telling border agents they had become disoriented while on patrol and accidentally crossed into the country, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said.

The incident began about 8 a.m. Friday, when the Border Patrol's Yuma, Arizona, sector was notified that a military-style Hummer was broken down, Customs and Border Patrol said in a written statement.

Agents said they found the vehicle about 200 yards from the Colorado River, and the seven individuals were dressed in military-style clothing. Customs and Border Patrol later determined that the troops' entry was unauthorized.

U.S. agents told the Mexican troops they were inside the United States and "peaceably" took them into custody, the statement said. "At no time were any hostilities exchanged between the agents and military officials."

The Hummer was equipped with a turret-mounted machine gun, the Border Patrol said.

According to Customs and Border Patrol, the soldiers were assigned to the 23rd Regiment Motorized Cavalry of the Mexican Army. The soldiers said they believed that they were still in Mexico because they remained on the south side of a newly constructed border fence.

Oops! How humiliating! Or, for recognized crazy man Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), just another tell-tale sign of the ongoing apocalypse:

"This is not an uncommon occurrence," Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado, told CNN. "Often times, it is the result of the Mexican military providing cover essentially for drug transportation across into our country, and/or creating a diversion so it will draw our people away from the place where the drugs are coming across."

Happy weekend to everyone!

Beyond the Norris Ad

My last post on Mike Huckabee, praising him for his hilarious Chuck Norris campaign ad, was a bit of a backhanded compliment. For this statement on illegal immigration, however, I give him genuine props:

"We penalize law-breakers. We don't penalize their children for something they can't help.

"If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can't come in the schoolhouse door'?

"No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."

I'm really starting to feel hopeful that the anti-immigration wave has crested (without, amazingly enough, doing any lasting damage). Hopefully, Huckabee's stance is a sign that even within the GOP, there will be a push back against the extremist Tancredo wing on this issue.

But even still, make no mistake. Huckabee's got the right position on this issue, but it's not an easy one to take in the Republican primary -- particularly when he's finally starting to show some life in the polls. I give him serious kudos for taking it.

Minority Report

Tavis Smiley, a leader of the American Black community, has been trying to put together a GOP candidates forum focusing on Black issues. Unfortunately, none of the major candidates seem interested in showing up. Now, several Black Republicans are telling their party that if they're serious about presenting themselves as a viable alternative to the Democratic Party, they've got to start acting like it:

Tavis did a 'Shout out' to his fellow Black Republicans, asking them why they were so silent on this matter. They keep on yapping that the GOP is a valid alternative for Black America, yet, when a nationally televised forum is put together so that GOP Candidates can present what they believe are GOP answers to concerns of the Black community, three of their Major Candidates don't even bother to respect Black Americans with their presence.

Why aren't these Black Republicans CHALLENGING their own frontrunners to appear in front of a Black audience?

I will give Maryland Senatorial Candidate Michael Steele credit. In an interview this week, Steele said that the GOP should be at Tavis' forum, and that they need to either ' put up or shut up' about being serious about presenting a platform to the Black community.

But, I haven't heard from any more prominent Black Republicans or Conservative Bloggers...their silence is deafening. And, until they speak up and out about this, they should just keep quiet about the GOP actually being a 'choice' for Black folk. But, as with so much else with the GOP, Black Republicans will find some sort of mental gymnastics to excuse this away.

At a prior forum on Black issues for GOP candidates, the only attendee was Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, who thus far is the only Republican to make such an appearance. Tancredo, who is running on a platform of "Immigrants Will Destroy America" probably thinks he can exploit simmering tensions between the Black and Latino community to make in-roads. And, for all I know, he's right. While I find Tancredo's views repugnant, at least he's actually making his pitch to Black voters and letting them decide how to respond to it.

But overall, Tancredo is the gaping exception, and this does strike me as an interesting extension of the Kanye West "George Bush [and the Republican Party] doesn't care about Black people" theorem. It is, I think, true that anybody who runs for President needs to be President of all American, and it's qualitatively harmful when certain groups -- particularly those which have been systematically excluded from political representation entirely for much of our nation's history -- perceive themselves as being utterly ignored by half the Presidential field.

Nobody expects the GOP to alter its long-standing political positions on affirmative action, the drug war, "tough on crime" policies, and other points of contention within the Black community. But at least nominally, they should have some argument for why these policies are actually to the benefit of Black people. And they do have these arguments -- they just only present them to White audiences (what good does that do?). Religious Christians are not my natural political compatriots, but I at least have arguments for why my positions are the right ones and ones they should adopt, and I've supported recent Democratic efforts to try and penetrate that community. For the GOP, though, its even worse, because they don't (publicly, anyway) concede that the Black community is inherently ideologically opposed to them (as is the case with, say, me and the "Christian Right"). This makes their spurning of Black candidate forums all the more troublesome.

Via Pam's

Huckabee Is The Story

The Ames Straw Poll has concluded, and the results are in. Mitt Romney won, but that was to be expected. What took many people by surprise (all but the most insightful political observers) was a strong second place showing by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. With his "back against the wall", Huckabee received a healthy 18% of the vote, well behind Mitt Romney's total, but also comfortably ahead of third-place finisher and bitter rival Senator Sam Brownback (KS). More importantly, Huckabee achieved his total without the benefits of a huge Iowa operation, all the more impressive when his main competition for the social conservative bloc, Brownback, was heavily invested in Iowa and apparently had 60-100 buses shipping in volunteers from all across the state.

So what's the overall effect? Well, Huckabee is in a really strong position. I mean, really strong. The primary barrier to his campaign was a lack of money and the perception that he was getting no traction. Well, guess what: he just got the latter, and I suspect the former will follow. Once he's established as a real player, a whole mess of the support from the social conservative base of the party are natural targets to be poached by his campaign. Does anybody think they're seriously happy with Romney, Thompson, McCain, or (shudder) Giuliani? Huckabee is the evangelicals' choice candidate now, and I suspect he's ready to start converting folks.

The three, four, and five spots were rounded out by Brownback, Rep. Tom Tancredo (CO), and Rep. Ron Paul (TX), respectively (recall that Fred Thompson, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani all declined to participate). Brownback is in a bit of a spot here, since he appeals to the same bloc of voters as Huckabee, had a better organization going in than Huckabee, and still lost. A third place finish for him isn't exactly bad, but it's difficult to see where he goes from here. Tancredo's finish impressed Publius, who notes that he had virtually no money and thus has something else driving his campaign. That something is the rabid anti-illegal immigration stance soaring through the Republican Party. It isn't enough to drive him to victory. But it is enough to make the eventual nominee take notice--which, honestly, is probably all Tancredo was hoping for anyway. Finally, Ron Paul's finish in the top half, while somewhat surprising in its own right, is far from high enough to really make him a legitimate candidate.

Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson's sixth place finish dooms his campaign, he said he needed a first or second place showing to continue.

And finally, we return to the winner, Mitt Romney. This post illustrates Romney's problem: despite having a perfectly fine, meets-expectations showing, the story is not about him. It really never could be about him: whoever finished second among the pack of dwarves trailing the main GOP pack was always going to be the subject of most of the media coverage, debating whether he should be added to the front-runner conversation. Unless Romney ran the table at the poll, there was no way that story could have been avoided. So, Romney will go into Iowa as the front-runner, but probably with a new pal to share the spotlight with. And, as I've remarked, Huckabee is in a great position to pose a serious danger to Romney's campaign.