Patch

The Bush budget provides an extra $150 million for that program (faith-based initiative), aimed at encouraging churches and other charitable groups to help those in need. But the budget then dumps onto these organizations the burdens arising from tens of billions of dollars of cuts in programs for the poor, the handicapped, and those otherwise disadvantaged

In the past four years, the number of immigrants into the US, legal and illegal, has closely matched the number of new jobs. (US Labor Department)

President Bush calls for giving millions of illegal immigrants a kind of guest-worker status as a legal path to US citizenship.

Meanwhile, US border patrols spend millions of dollars a year trying to keep illegals out.

What employers really want in many cases by hiring immigrants is to hold down wage costs, experts say.

RYAN SAGER: "In coming years, political historians might look back and try to pinpoint the day or week or month that the Republican Party shed the last vestiges of its small-government philosophy. If and when they do, the week just past should make the short list. For it was in this last week that the Republican-controlled Congress made it clear that it sees no area of American life -- none too trivial and none too intimate -- that the federal government should not permeate with its power."
Having intervened in this state issue in 2005, future Republicans will have a hard time urging federal restraint in the name of decentralization.
Republicans will now bear greater responsibility for the rising cost of health care. That is, if the elephantine federal government has become so energetic - some might say paternalistic - that it reaches into local courtroom dramas in the name of preserving life, then that same GOP Establishment will have to deal with the cost of keeping such people alive
Will Republicans dare say that their "culture of life" extends only to those who can pay?

We are reminded that the media, especially cable news, can turn a tragic news story into a soap opera.

The Patch