In their desire to find a compromise acceptable to the chronically short-sighted and self-destructive Republican Party, Democrats have crafted an immigration bill that is for the most part as unobjectionable as it is uninspired. The bill cobbles together a series of pragmatic concessions that, while perhaps sufficient to overcome conservative objections, will likely prove wholly insufficient at actually addressing the problem it was designed to solve — that is, fixing our broken immigration system. The tangle of hurdles and exclusions, loopholes for businesses and pitfalls for immigrants, is precisely the mess we should be cleaning up, not making worse.

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Confused? I can explain. The Romeike family aren’t just any immigrants. They are evangelical Christians from Germany. And, oh yeah, they’re white.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike are devout Christians who want to home-school their five children. But under German law, attendance at an officially recognized school — whether a public school or a private religious or secular school — is mandatory. Facing over $10,000 in mounting fines and police escorting their children to school daily, the Romeikes were contacted by the Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association — which was looking to expand its work internationally --  and suggested the Romeike’s resettle in Morristown, Tenn., and apply for political asylum.

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This weekend, the Orwellian-named Exxon Pegasus pipeline spilled thousands of barrels of oil into a residential neighborhood in Mayflower, Ark. Twenty-two families were evacuated from their homes, and cleanup, days later, continues. Check out this appalling video of crude oil leaking into the streets of this everyday American community:

The oil is the same heavy crude from tar sands that oil companies behind the Keystone XL pipeline want to extract. In fact, the only difference between the Pegasus pipeline that leaked and the proposed Keystone XL? The proposed Keystone XL is longer --- over 300 miles longer than the pipeline that leaked in Arkansas on Friday. That means the Keystone XL pipeline is even more likely to leak. Not exactly a comforting prospect.

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Here’s what I wrote in my original Salon essay:

In the interest of expediency and bringing as many unlikely conservative allies on board, the gay rights movement may give cover to or even amplify a set of narrow values that rank married families as better than unmarried families, two parents as better than one parent — norms that continue to divide America into good people and deserving families versus everyone else. And even if we temporarily succeed in getting gay folks added to the “good” category, is it worth it? Plus do we really think that’s the way we or anyone else will be treated equally?

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Sure, Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced his support for same-sex marriage because he wants equality for his own gay son, but Portman also rationalized his views within a conservative values framework. In an Op-Ed announcing his change of heart, Portman wrote that he supports allowing gay couples to marry because he is a conservative, not in spite of it:

We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives. We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.

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I was with you from the very beginning. OK, well, not the very beginning. But in December of 2007, I helped organize the country’s first ever grassroots presidential forum — where folks from community organizations shared the stage with you and other candidates and asked all the questions. When that event started, I was backing another candidate. But by the end of the day, you had me.

“This idea of community values,” you said to the audience of farmers and farmworkers and families on welfare, “is not just the cause of a campaign for me, it is the cause of my life.”

And I believed you. Maybe because I wanted to believe you. Maybe because I needed someone in whom to believe. But I believed you.

Sure, I had friends from Illinois progressive circles who warned me that, no matter the rhetoric, you were a proven centrist at heart. They shouted and waved their hands. But I didn’t listen. I was enthralled and excited and brimming with hope.

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The cowardly Democrats put it all on the table
Like cuts to the elderly, poor and disabled.
So Republicans, thinking their ploy was a score,
Figured why not hold out until Democrats cut more!

Even with taxes the lowest in years
Republican donors clung tight to their Lears.
If taxes were raised there would be hell to pay
And less money to beg for come re-election day.

Plus unlike Democrats, Republicans were clear
They wanted to drown government, and this was their year.
Never mind the election or the poll trackings
Democrats missed the message and their weak spines were cracking.

With one little press conference, lively and quick,
Obama pulled out the rug from under seniors like St. Nick.
And conservative Democrats are disgustingly jolly
Pretending that poor folks can live off of holly.

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If 2011 numbers are predictive, more than 12,000 people will be killed by guns in America this year.

That’s four times the number of people who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet while we mourned together as a nation after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then went to war against al-Qaida and two sovereign nations, it appears to have taken 20 schoolchildren being gunned down in Connecticut for politicians of either party to challenge the power of the NRA.

And this when even a strong majority of NRA members support common-sense gun control! Exactly how many bodies have to pile up for Washington to find the will to act?

Every day in America, 34 Americans are killed by guns. Every day in America, at least one of those killed is under the age of 14. In the wake of all-too-frequent mass shootings, we tend to ignore the even more frequent, quotidian gun deaths that are devastating our communities, destroying families and endangering our children. Here are just a few stories about lives that might have been saved with sensible gun laws.

Linkin Leatham, 2

Linkin’s parents called their son the “miracle baby” for having overcome several complications at birth and defying doctors’ expectations that he wouldn’t survive.  Then, in September, 2-year-old Linkin picked up his father’s handgun and shot himself in the eye, ultimately dying from his wounds. Linkin’s father is a Utah police officer, though the weapon involved in the shooting was not his service weapon.

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Following a shooting at a school in England in early 2009, a forensic psychiatrist told the BBC about his plea to media outlets worldwide:

If you don't want to propagate more mass murders...

Don't start the story with sirens blaring.

Don't have photographs of the killer.

Don't make this 24/7 coverage.

Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story … not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.

Do localize this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.

Why don’t we listen?

There is compelling evidence that the way we cover mass shootings, especially in America, gives too much attention to the shooter, in effect turning him into a celebrity and creating a perverse incentive for other social outcasts to seek the spotlight through carnage.

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In case you missed it, DeGeneres stars in a new JC Penney’s ad in which the openly gay TV host flagrantly tries to persuade three of Santa’s elves to make more toys for Christmas. While at first glance, a naive viewer might think the ad is a ploy by a crumbling department store to boost holiday business by promising free stuff, the trained eyes at the conservative One Million Moms group know better.

Vulnerable Americans watching their televisions will obviously be brainwashed. Hmm, what should I get Uncle Sid for Christmas this year? I know, homosexuality! JC Penney’s is practically giving it away!

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Estimates suggest that, between political party spending and super PAC largess around the presidential and congressional races, this past election cost as much as $6 billion.  That is just astonishing.  And astonishingly wasteful.

Karl Rove alone raised and spent upward of $400 million to influence the election.  Instead, Rove and the hidden donors behind his super PAC could have given over $1,500 to every unemployed person in Virginia — that is, he could have actually done something good with the money, and maybe won the state.  Leave aside the fact that Republicans oppose unemployment assistance; the point is, our electoral spending is wildly out of proportion with the realities of voters and even the proportions of the recent past.  In 2004, the record $1 billion in campaign spending made headlines and set records.  Now we’ve eclipsed that sixfold.

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Since the 2008 election, President Obama has been widely criticized (including by yours truly) for demobilizing his electoral base, funneling his massive volunteer and voter outreach operation into the bowels of the Democratic National Committee instead of encouraging and allowing it to thrive as an independent, movement-like entity. With a mobilized base exerting its will on Congress, President Obama could have won a bigger stimulus package, stronger banking reform, and a more progressive healthcare reform bill. Then again, the base could have mobilized against the president — for instance, to oppose extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich or to condemn the expansion of drone strikes. The fact is that President Obama and his White House spent an extraordinary amount of energy in his first term trying not to cooperate with the movement-left but to control it, organizing meetings at which White House flacks would try to dictate messages and strategy to progressive advocacy groups.

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But if Sarah Palin were paying attention to the needs and best interests of her home state of Alaska, it would not be outrageous for her to endorse President Obama for reelection.  In fact, it would be entirely sensible and sane.  Ironically, most red states that vote for Republican leaders fare better economically under Democrats.  In fact, under President Obama, Alaska has fared even better than most.

Alaska received more stimulus dollars per capita than any other state in the nation.  For instance, as of August of 2010 (when the bulk of stimulus spending had been dispatched), Alaska had an unemployment rate of 7.9 percent (two points below the national average) but received $3,145 per person in federal stimulus dollars.  But Florida, with an unemployment rate at 11.4 percent got just $914 in per capita stimulus spending.  And, incidentally, Alaska is not a poor state — with oil revenues that make up 88 percent of the state’s general fund.

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I’m not saying I support much of what Chris Christie stands for.  As governor of New Jersey, Christie raised taxes on the poor and middle classes while advocating tax breaks for the rich.  Christie vetoed marriage equality legislation and said that civil rights should have been subject to a “popular” vote in the 1960s. Christie pushed a voucher plan to drain money from public schools to fund private education while bashing teachers and other public sector unions.  And after all this, New Jersey’s unemployment rate hovers around 9.8 percent as of September — a full 2 percentage points higher than the rest of the nation.  Not much to be proud of there.

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“We will back up our words with actions.”

The first quote is from a speech on foreign policy Mitt Romney delivered in early October at the Virginia Military Institute.  The second is from a policy meeting between George W. Bush and leaders of Lebanon.

Much as Romney is trying to distinguish himself on foreign policy, the fact is that if Barack Obama and George W. Bush had a foreign policy love child, it would be Mitt Romney. Rhetorically, Romney sounds almost exactly like George W. Bush.  In terms of what he’d do on the ground in places like Iran and Syria, Romney sounds exactly like Barack Obama.  So what will Mitt Romney do on foreign policy if elected?  As with everything else about Romney, he’s so mercurial it’s impossible to know.  But the signals are ominous.

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In general, the list of celebrities contributing to, stumping for and endorsing President Obama is far too long for this column. But a week ago, when a little-known actress named Stacey Dash (who, ahem, is black) announced her support for Mitt Romney, conservatives went nuts. According to Glenn Beck’s the Blaze website, “Twitter exploded” with the news. Or at least his feed did. But the point is, just as Republicans were so excited to nab Clint Eastwood that they let him ramble unscripted to an empty chair for 10 minutes, Romney backers were so excited to have a black actress endorse Romney that it didn’t seem to matter no one had ever heard of her.

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Of course, now that he’s the GOP candidate for vice president, Paul Ryan insists that Romney’s views are the ones driving their swerving, accident-prone limousine of a campaign — but since Paul Ryan is in the running to be a heartbeat away from taking the wheel, we shouldn’t lose sight of his vision for America.

1. Some rapes are worse than others

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After all, the former mayor of the so-called People’s Republic of Oakland and now-repeat governor of California, was called “more of a fiscal conservative than Governor Reagan” by American Conservative magazine and pilloried in a Dead Kennedy’s song as a “hippie-fascist.”  And now Gov. Brown has vetoed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, which would grant basic labor and wage protections to 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and home-health aides in the state.

Across the country, though voters are increasingly divided into increasingly fervent red-versus-blue camps, many Democratic leaders and candidates are little better than Brown.  Take Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who, when he ran for his seat in 2010, cut a TV commercial where he fired a rifle through his party’s signature environmental legislation.  Or Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who was the only Democrat in 2011 to vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating until the following fall.

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And we got into the docks and they were all full and I looked around, there was no place to park, so we stopped at the end of a dock. They all jumped off and ran up the dock. And I realized there was nobody in the boat to help me dock the boat, handle the ropes, do anything - they just left me out there at sea. So I finally found a place to park after about 20 minutes, and I pulled in, I said, 'Who's going to grab the rope?,' and I looked up and there was Mitt Romney. So he pulled me in, he tied up the boat for me. He rescued me just as he's going to rescue this great country.'

No doubt all of the big donors in the room who have boats so big it takes more than one person to dock them were nodding along and thinking, “Yeah, Mitt Romney understands us rich people and is here to help.”  Of course, for the 99 percent of other voters, that is precisely the problem.

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Do we see sometimes us going overboard in our campaign — are there mistakes that are made or areas where there's no doubt that somebody could dispute how we are presenting things? You know, that happens in politics.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney still won’t release more than two years of full tax returns.

What do these two situations have to do with each other and the election? Everything.

Despite baseless Republican assertions to the contrary, Barack Obama has sought from Day One to take responsibility for his actions as president. So, after three and a half years in which Republicans have blocked every piece of legislation Obama has proposed and generally been as uncooperative as possible  — economic recovery be damned — Obama repeated this weekend what he has said before:  “I take full responsibility for everything that we do."

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