TheDC Morning: House passes bill aimed at denying stupid immigrants citizenship

1.) Democrats angry that Obama is letting the ‘terrorists’ hold America for ‘ransom’ — Welcome to 2010, the year American Democrats made a mockery out of the many lives lost here and abroad over the last decade by comparing the fight over taxes to the acts of Islamic militants and Mexican drug cartels! “Just as we do not negotiate with international terrorists, we must stand up to the political terrorism of the Republicans in the United States Senate,” wrote California Democratic Party chairman John Burton in an email to California Democrats. Back in Washington, Pres. Obama’s offhand comment that Republicans are “hostage-takers” has inspired a liberal group to launch the “Hostage Prevention Initiative.” In actual terrorism news, Sergeant Jason Peto passed away at Bethesda Naval Medical Center yesterday from wounds inflicted by actual terrorists in late November.

2.) House passes bill aimed at denying stupid immigrants citizenship — With the aid of a handful of Republican members, House Democrats yesterday passed the DREAM act. First proposed in 2001, the act “extends conditional legal status for five years to those illegal aliens who were younger than 16 when they entered the country, have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, and have a degree from a U.S. high school, or the equivalent,” reports The Hill. In addition, “beneficiaries can apply for an additional five years of conditional nonimmigrant status if they’ve completed at least two years of higher education or military service. Afterward, they could apply for permanent legal status.” Assuming Senate Democrats are able to muster enough votes, 17-year-olds, stupid kids, and pacifists will soon have to hike their happy asses back to the third-world war zones from whence they came.

3.) Senate Republicans defend decision to set money on fire — Among all the hoopla about increasing the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars and giving the unemployed another full year to sort their business out, Republicans and Democrats from the midwest teamed up to defend ethanol subsidies. “Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, said in no uncertain terms that the new tax deal will include an extension of those ethanol subsidies,” reports The Daily Caller’s Amanda Carey. Grassley, who is a ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, said that ethanol will somehow save us from having to buy oil from Venezuelan peckerwood Hugo Chavez. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that is a lie. “If it’s such a great bargain,” Lewis said, “why do we need a law to force us to buy it? The answer is it’s a great bargain for corn growers,” and “an incredible scam” for everybody else. Incidentally, Grassley is probably aware that our need for ethanol is bogus. “It’s important to remember that the incentive exists to help the producers of ethanol compete with the big oil industry, and remember the big oil industry has been well supported by the federal treasury for more than a whole century.” Shorter version: If you’re going to give pork to oil barons, why not give it to farmers, too?

4.) Obama cronies continue to make mockery of president’s campaign promises of transparency — The civil liberties and open government group Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see if Freedom of Information Act requests under Obama had improved, per the president’s promise more than a year ago that they would. So the EFF decided to file multiple requests for the same FBI documents in order to see if the FBI withheld or redacted the same aspects every time. You won’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t. “In several cases, the FBI redacted more information in later-produced documents than it did in earlier-produced documents,” reports EFF. “In other cases, the FBI redacted differing amounts of information when it produced two copies of the same report in response to the same FOIA request. Sometimes the agency blocked out whole paragraphs, while at other times it blocked out only the key words that explain the details of its acts. What is interesting is that the FBI claimed the same FOIA exemptions in each version; it just applied them differently.” So, not only are agencies getting more secretive under Obama, they are apparently getting stupider as well.

5.) Unemployment situation is worse than you thought — “Nearly 6 million Americans looked for work but weren’t able to find employment at all last year,” reports the Wall Street Journal. A report released Wednesday by the Labor Department “highlights the long-term unemployment problem that’s likely to linger for years. Some 5.8 million job-seekers were without work for the entire year in 2009, an increase of 2.7 million from a year earlier.” The problem is so bad, in fact, that the Labor Department is going to change how it tracks unemployment. “Starting in January,” reports the WSJ, “the Labor Department will begin tracking unemployment durations for up to five years instead of two years.”

6.) Nobody is happy with the House spending bill — The spending bill that the House passed last night “would cap the annual operating budgets of federal agencies at the $1.2 trillion approved for the recently finished budget year — a $46 billion cut of more than 3 percent from President Barack Obama’s request,” reports the AP. The Senate version will be even bigger as “Senate Democrats are working on a different approach that would provide slightly more money and would include thousands of pet projects sought by lawmakers.”