Senator Craig Thomas, RIP

Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming has died after a battle with acute myeloid leukemia.

The senator's family issued a statement saying he died Monday evening at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. He had been receiving chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia.

Just before the 2006 election, Thomas was hospitalized with pneumonia and had to cancel his last campaign stops. He nonetheless won with 70 percent of the vote, monitoring the election from his hospital bed.

Two days after the election, Thomas announced that he had just been diagnosed with leukemia……

……Thomas was a low-key lawmaker who reliably represented the interests of his conservative state, often becoming involved in public lands issues. He worked in behind-the-scenes posts to oversee national parks, including Yellowstone in Wyoming.

He was also an advocate for domestic energy and minerals production. He worked to protect Wyoming's mining industry from foreign competition and backed efforts to get a federally funded coal gasification plant built in the state.

A quiet, behind the scenes Senator. My sincere condolences his family.

Staggering

Callimachus from Done With Mirrors has a post up about what it is like trying to get through the black and white, doctrinaire world that many pundits, both in the media and in the self-defined world that is the new media, have created. It's a bit like a stagger if you look only at the person navigating it without taking into account the heaving of the seas of the world.

Much is made this week of conservatives "abandoning" Bush. Some of what is said about it makes sense. Most of it is nonsense.

I'm not a conservative, so I can't speak for them. Who I can speak for are people who are not doctrinaire and locked into eternal opposition to someone or something or some party or some nation. People, in other words, who try to navigate the real world as it happens around them, guided by principles but not ossified by them, aware of ideologies and also of their limitations. Such a person's course of actions is bound to look like a drunken stagger when you only watch the walker, not the pitching deck of the world as it goes on around him.

In some sense, everything is a necessary evil — from abortions to zoos — with equal emphasis on both parts of the clause. Often you accept the bad for the sake of opposing the worse. And your rough measure of "bad" and "worse" is always being re-calibrated, unless you're stupid.

By all means, please read the rest - it is very well written and defines a real problem.

I have been pegged - whether or not I quite fit - into a conservative hole in the pegboard that is the interwebby tube equivalent of reality. Am I conservative in some things? Oh yeah. Very much so. But I think (and I hope longtime readers understand) that I am what I would consider to be classic liberal in other respects. (Not the leftist-defined, nanny-state authoritarianism that is routinely called "liberal" today. The classical 'freedom is good, tyranny is bad' liberalism that this country was founded on.) So I stagger along in the manner Callimachus so adroitly describes.

I have - and still do - support the war in Iraq regardless of whether it was a great idea or not. Because it is the war we have rather than the war we want. It would be simply marvelous if we always had things go our way in the world. It would also be the height of arrogance to think it ever will happen that way. As it is the height of arrogance to ascribe everything that is good or evil in the world to this nation's actions. That is a particularly insidious form of cultural bias that assumes nobody else in the world is free to act without our leave. Or that, conversely, only we in the West can lead the benighted masses out of their darkness (as Al Gore likes to preach). I strongly disagree with the administration over immigration policy and the so-called reform that is being stuffed through Congress. But I am also willing to be flexible rather than doctrinaire - as long as the border is secured first.

In other words, I stagger along.

I support a lot of things for a simple reason: the alternative is worse. Go read what Callimachus wrote.

I'd as soon not sit at that table, either. Ever.

Losing Ground

Here I am citing the Washington Times again, not something I do with great regularity. But they have what should be a media blockbuster - but they are the only ones reporting it. The super-whamadyne new Senate compromise immigration "reform" bill will have a whopping effect on illegal immigration according to none other than the Congressional Budget Office.

It will reduce illegal immigration by 25%. At best.

The Senate's immigration bill will only reduce illegal immigration by about 25 percent a year, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report, Stephen Dinan will report Tuesday in The Washington Times.

The bill's new guest-worker program could lead to at least 500,000 more illegal immigrants within a decade, said the report from the CBO, which said in its official cost estimate that it assumes some future temporary workers will overstay their time in the plan, adding up to a half-million by 2017 and 1 million by 2027.

"We anticipate that many of those would remain in the United States illegally after their visas expire," CBO said of the guest-worker program, which would allow 200,000 new workers a year to rotate into the country.

And in a blow to President Bush's timetable, the CBO said the "triggers" — setting up the verification system, deploying 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents to duty and constructing hundreds of miles of fencing and vehicle barriers — won't be met until 2010.

Those triggers must be met before the temporary worker program could begin, and Mr. Bush had hoped to have them completed about the time he leaves office in January 2009.

And this has finally convinced Ed Morrisey that the "compromise" is a sham and he is backing away, rapidly. Don Surber is reporting that Mitch McConnell will not step away from this monstrosity. And the fallout will be very, very ugly when the voters have their say. Both parties are going to suffer from this little fiasco.

My advice: Call. Your. Senators. Make it very clear that you want the problem of illegal immigration solved - but securing the border is the first order of business. And that you WILL not vote for a Senator that compromises that. A supposed solution that will - at best - reduce the problem by 25% is a joke and must not be passed into law.

Well, It Could Have Been Worse

1,683 guitarists came out to a Kansas City ballpark to try to shatter the Guinness Book world record for the most people playing the same song. They appear to have done so. The song? Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water.

Some came from as far away as California and Germany on Sunday to take part in a Kansas City radio station's effort to break a Guinness world record for the most people playing the same song simultaneously. The record had been 1,323 people playing the same song in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1994.

"It was cool to see little kids playing, people who had been playing for their whole lives, like older people, and then I'm sure there were people like me who just picked up the song a couple days before," said Autumn McPherson, of Winfield, a senior at the University of Kansas.

Preliminary numbers show 1,683 people played the popular early '70s guitar riff on Sunday at CommunityAmerica Ballpark.

"I thought it was going to be kind of cheesy," said Hannah Koch, of Prairie Village, who came clad in an elf costume. "But after I got here, I got caught up in the excitement of it."

A local DJ, Tanna Guthrie, came up with the idea. Now, frankly, Smoke on the Water is a very simple song to play - I think every beginning guitar player can learn how to do that song in a very short time. Heck, I did when I was learning. And the cardinal rule of beginning guitar players is also important: distortion makes everything sound better also applies. But we salute Ms. Guthrie for choosing the old Deep Purple song.

Because if it had been Stairway to Heaven, we would have tracked you down.

Secession

It seems that there is a very small, but very loud and persistent group of people living in Vermont that want to secede from the United States. Lovely. I thought, as does one of the people quoted in the article, that we had settled this a long time ago. Right around 1865 as I recall. But that doesn’t appear to enter into the calculations or pronouncements of what is – rather obviously, judging by the rhetoric they use – an extremely left-wing group.

Disillusioned by what they call an empire about to fall, a small cadre of writers and academics hopes to put the question before citizens in March. Eventually, they want to persuade state lawmakers to declare independence, returning Vermont to the status it held from 1777 to 1791.

Neither the state nor the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids secession, but few people think it is politically viable.

"I always thought the Civil War settled that," said Russell Wheeler, a constitutional law expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. If Vermont fought and won a war with the federal government, "then you could say Vermont proved the point. But that's not going to happen."

Still, the idea has found plenty of sympathetic ears in Vermont, a left-leaning state that said yes to civil unions, no to slavery (before any other) and last year elected a socialist to the U.S. Senate.

Supporters have published a "Green Mountain Manifesto" subtitled "Why and How Tiny Vermont Might Help Save America From Itself by Seceding from the Union."

In 2005, about 300 people turned out for a secession convention in the Statehouse, and plans for a second one are in the works. A poll this year by the University of Vermont's Center for Rural Studies found that 13 percent of those surveyed support secession, up from 8 percent a year before.

"The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable — it's too big, it's too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens," said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.

"We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war," Williams said. "If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what's left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire."

Two words, Mr. Williams (and long time readers know I do not use language like this lightly): Bite me.

I happened to look up my family name on a website that lists soldiers from the Civil War – My family name is extremely unusual in that we all come from one common ancestor and a misspelled county record (there are only about 7,000 people with this particular name in this country of 300 million.)

91 people with my family name fought in the civil war. 72 of those on the Union side (the few who fought on the other side were from branches of the family living in Southern states). Many of those 72 died. My family fought – and died - to keep this nation together.

Your narcissistic, self-absorbed goal is to tear it apart.

Nuts

We really aren't sure what to make of this particular news article. A Malaysian scientist claims that he has discovered a way to use walnuts in a rather new application: to treat Erectile Dysfunction or ED. Yeah, really, he's saying nuts are good for your.. um … enjoyment of certain activities.

Kim Kah Hwi, who headed the team of researchers from the the University of Malaya, said he was inspired to look into walnuts after reading about their use in history, the Star daily reported.

"I read articles about the Romans and French having eaten walnuts for this purpose. I thought if it had been documented that long ago, then there surely has to be something there," he told the newspaper.

It took Kim and his research team two years to develop "N-Hanz", tablets which contain walnut extract and have shown positive results on 40 volunteers against erectile dysfunction.

"It takes about an hour for the effects to set in and it will last for about four hours," said Kim.

"Furthermore, because it is not a drug, it is safe for those with hypertension or diabetes, or (those) who have recently had heart bypasses," he said.

Some of the volunteers had undergone bypass surgery, Kim added.

Kim said the active ingredient was an amino acid called arginine, which is absorbed into the body and converted into nitric oxide, according to the newspaper.

This may actually go a long way to explaining the inexhaustible supply of squirrels worldwide. And the old expression, "Nuts to you," may actually be a bigger insult than anyone realized.

Things They Do Look Awful C-C-Cold

Talkin' 'bout my generation. This is too good not to pass along. A British - er - rock group - with a combined age totaling over 3,000 years has just had their first single break into the British top 30. The song? A cover of the Who classic My Generation. The lead singer is one Alf Carretta, who is a sprightly 90 years young.

Their charity cover of The Who's rock anthem "My Generation", with lead vocals by 90-year-old Alf Carretta, hit number 26 in the chart.

The oldest band member is 100-year-old Buster Martin, who is the oldest employee in Britain.

Named after Zimmer frames, the 40-strong group was formed as part of a BBC television documentary about the isolation felt among Britain's elderly folk.

Their video has been viewed more than 2.3 million times on the Internet video-sharing site YouTube.

The Zimmers also include Peter Oakley, better known as geriatric1927, whose video musings on life once made him the YouTube poster with the most subscribers.

His video "first try" was watched nearly 2.6 million times and he is still the 10th most subscribed user ever.

The single is available from the iTunes store with all proceeds going to charity. And the video is a hoot - do not miss the part where they re-enact the classic Beatles' Abbey Road album cover. With a real twist. They also have a - what else - MySpace page.

Just seeing this made me think about my grandmother. When she retired from the Sunmount state hospital where she had helped people with Downs Syndrome, she began her next careers - advocate for the aged, writer and a whole lot of other things. She was instrumental in getting a community center for the elderly in Saranac Lake, New York, one of the prime movers in getting housing built for older residents and she started (and wrote regularly for) the community center's newsletter. And at age 95 she took up learning conversational German (she was born in Norway). She passed away at age 103. I still miss her.

Jefferson Indicted

Representative William "Cold Cash" Jefferson has been indicted for 16 different alleged violations of Federal law. If convicted on all counts, he could spend the next 235 years in Federal prison.

The indictment handed up in federal court in Alexandria., Va., Monday is 94 pages long and lists 16 alleged violations of federal law that could keep Jefferson in prison for up to 235 years, according to a Justice Department official who has seen the document.

Among the charges listed in the indictment, said the official, are racketeering, soliciting bribes, wire fraud, money-laundering, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

Jefferson is accused of soliciting bribes for himself and his family, and also for bribing a Nigerian official.

Almost two years ago, in August 2005, investigators raided Jefferson's home in Louisiana and found $90,000 in cash stuffed into a box in his freezer.

Two of Jefferson's partners in this little plan have already pleaded guilty to the offenses.

A Heartwarming Update

On Gustav the flaccid, a German ostrich with some performance problems. (We first posted about Gustav here.) It seems that the great legal case against the teens who set off fireworks, allegedly leading to Gustav's dysfunctional state, has been settled.

BAUTZEN, Germany - Three German teenagers have been spared paying hefty damages after a court ruled it could not prove an ostrich farmer's claim that their festive firecrackers made one of his birds impotent.

Court proceedings in the eastern town of Bautzen ended Monday with a settlement that will see the three pay only euro140 ($188) in vet costs for Gustav the ostrich.

Farmer Rico Gabel had claimed euro5,000 ($6,730) in damages for the alleged antics on Dec. 27-29, 2005, of the three youths, aged 17-18. They were not identified by name.

The farmer claimed that fireworks set off by the boys made the previously lustful Gustav apathetic and depressed, and thus unable to perform for a half-a-year with his two female breeding partners.

As we understand it, Gustav's apathetic and depressed state came about when one of the female ostriches made a remark to him after seeing the fireworks set off: "You've never done that for me." Hell hath no fury like an unsatisfied ostrich.

We Regret To Inform Our Readers

That Skippy has died. No, not our evil twin, Skippy the kangaroo. No, not this guy. We mean real kangaroo. A real kangaroo from Indiana by the name of Skippy.

FOUNTAINTOWN, Ind. - A 6-foot-tall kangaroo that surprised residents as it bounded through rural central Indiana during the weekend died Monday after authorities used a tranquilizer dart was used to capture it.

Hancock County Animal Control officers helped capture the Australian marsupial, an escaped pet named Skippy, early Monday not far from its home.

The cause of Skippy's death was not known, said Kenny McConahay, an officer with the Greenfield/Hancock County Animal Control Department.

It was not known what the kangaroo had done or eaten during its weekend of freedom, and the amount of tranquilizer used in the dart was only half of the recommended dose, McConahay said.

"When our officer left the scene, it was still alive and coming out (of sedation). It was recovering," McConahay said.

And wait until you hear this part:

Neighbor Jim Greider saw the kangaroo Friday night and thought it was a huge rabbit.

Are we certain the kangaroo's name wasn't Harvey? Six-foot rabbits are relatively rare, even in Indiana. Now while the Macropus giganteus indianus is barely known in the United States, it is the only native species of Kangaroo found here according to our source. We're told its diet consists mainly of fast food and that it is particularly fond of light beer. Our source also regularly reports seeing six-foot rabbits and, on bad days, pink elephants. So we'd take that last bit of natural history with a grain of salt.

Overrun By Rats

Britain continues to be the leading place where the overlords of the Animal Uprising™ are gearing up for next year's themed celebrations for the Year of the Rat. They have so many rats prepositioned for the festivities that they are running around in broad daylight looking for food and generally panhandling.

Stand stock still in the open space next to the railings encircling the pond in Waterlow Park and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a rat will gnaw at your shoe.

Last Sunday just after midday I was witness to several visitors with little children in tow hesisant to cross the road in fear of the rats scurrying across, aghast at the sight of these creatures in broad daylight on a public footpath.

Rats are nocturnal (rarely diurnal) and to find them boldly scavenging for scraps of food thrown to the ducks by inconsiderate visitors came as a surprise to me.

It is time signs were put up to discourage the practice as it is encouraging the breeding of rats in a much loved park. As rats are known to carry over 20 different diseases such as typhus, salmonella and the dreaded weil's, some minor re-landscaping of the rocky outcrops along the bank may be necessary to discourage their breeding and disrupt rat runs.

</humor> This is an even worse problem than the writer acknowledges. Frankly, if you see one rat, you have a lot more. If you see many rats in broad daylight, you have a massive infestation going. And unless something is done very soon, it will get even worse. Will it take a human dying from something like rabies they catch from an infected rat to get the authorities to step in and actually do something?

The Endless Supply Of Squirrels

A Colorado resident is learning - the hard way - that you simply cannot get rid of squirrels. There is a limitless supply of the beasts being churned out by the overlords of the Animal Uprising™.

Rick Schulte is locked in battle with a neighbor who won’t give up and won’t go away.

Actually, Schulte is fighting dozens in Villa Loma Heights in northeast Colorado Springs.

One after another they take him on, only to fall into his trap.

Although Schulte is winning each battle, experts say he will lose the war. Schulte’s relentless enemy is the the bushy-tailed, garden-raiding, chattering tree squirrel.

“I’d prefer to have birds,” Schulte said. “I thought, maybe if I can reduce the threat a little bit, that would be my goal.”

Schulte started planning his assault last summer when squirrels cleaned the corn out of his 40-foot-by-10-foot backyard garden.

“It puzzled me how to protect my garden,” he said. “I got discouraged. I felt I was being eaten alive.”

He even debated strategy with a neighbor.

“We discussed defensive moves like scarecrows,” Schulte said. “But those are just ornaments to the squirrels. They are meaningless.”

So when spring arrived, Schulte, 65, a retired systems analyst at Shriever Air Force Base, bought a trap, loaded it with peanut butter blobs and set it in his yard.

“I usually catch one or two a day,” he said. “I take them about five miles from here and release them. I don’t hurt them.”

To his surprise, Schulte finds his program isn’t working.

“They just keep coming out of the woodwork,” he said. “These squirrels are indestructible.”

It's actually worse than that. The squirrels share a group mind and they have targeted Mr. Schulte for conquest and eventual assimilation. He'll be feeding the squirrels soon, we're sad to say. The squirrels, however, are not actually indestructible. An effective control plan, however, requires the extensive use of flamethrowers and would likely not endear Schulte to the neighbors. On the other hand, since we installed ours, the neighbors never get close enough to complain.

Please, Spare Us. Please.

All we can do is pray that John Howard won't commit this horrible crime against humanity. One of the traditions at the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference is that all of the visiting heads of state get dressed up in clothing that reflects the host country for a photo op. Which is a sort of fun, tongue-in-cheek thing that is generally harmless. But if this year's host, Australia, does what some folks are suggesting, we may get treated to a photo op of men wearing 'budgie smugglers'. Pray, people, pray.

Over the years the VIPs — including the US, Russian and Chinese presidents and a host of regional leaders — have been pictured in a range of bright Asian silks, Chilean ponchos and Canadian leather jackets.

Speculation over what the leaders will be asked to wear in down-to-earth, 'G'day mate' Australia has begun to preoccupy the chattering classes.

A popular guess is the rugged look of a classic Australian oilskin raincoat made famous in the movie "The Man from Snowy River," perhaps teamed with an Akubra hat, the Australian version of the cowboy hat.

That could fit with Prime Minister John Howard's pledge that the outfits to be worn by the likes of US President George W. Bush, Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Hu Jintao would have "a distinctly Australian flavour."

But so could another classic Australian outfit suggested in the letters pages of The Australian newspaper Monday — the tiny, tight men's bathing briefs known here as "budgie smugglers," for obvious reasons.

One major point in favour of the budgie smuggler option in this surf-and-sand-crazed society would be that it is cheap.

The resort my family goes to down in Florida caters to a crowd that includes a very large population of Europeans. At any of the many pools around the place, it is really easy to spot these folks. Look for the elderly (and the years have been most unkind) 400 pound guy in a Speedo and his even larger wife in a string bikini. (I WISH I were making this up). Please, Australia, don't punish us like this.

Thompson’s Biggest Challenge

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the biggest hurdle Fred Thompson has to clear: raising money. And it is a very, very high bar.

As a late entry into the crowded, expensive, presidential campaign, Fred Thompson's first big test of viability will be his ability to raise money quickly.

A major part of the former Tennessee senator's strategy is a heavy reliance on the Internet to get his message out and to raise funds. He is also trying to tap into the large number of well-heeled Republican financiers who have yet to commit to a 2008 hopeful, amid widespread disaffection among party loyalists with the current field.

Yet a late start and signs that Mr. Thompson may adopt an unconventional campaign style — limiting in-person appearances by making extensive use of blogging and online video — could crimp the television actor's ability to raise money over the long haul. He has suggested he isn't enamored of leaving his family for long stretches of campaign travel. The question is whether an Internet campaign will help him raise money quickly or leave big donors cold.

Signs suggest that he won't have trouble in the early going. In a conference call Tuesday with more than 100 supporters, Mr. Thompson flogged each to raise a quick $46,000 by early this week to become "First Day Founders," participants said. Each can presumably meet his or her goal by tapping 20 friends to make a maximum $2,300 individual donation. If they do, Mr. Thompson will start his campaign with a quick display of fund-raising prowess and about $5 million on hand.

The article points out that a lot of big time Republican fundraisers are already committed to other candidates. So Thompson may find that "the ship has already sailed". Then again, he may surprise everyone. There are a lot of old "conventional wisdom" articles of faith that are changing rapidly. While some politicians look askance at the internet, there really is a sea change happening due to this new medium. The previously departed ships might just hit those sea changes and founder. Perhaps Thompson is savvy enough to provide a rescue vessel.

“A Very Dangerous Piece Of Legislation.”

The Christian Science Monitor has an article describing the mounting pressure on Republican Senators involved in the immigration "reform" bill. It ain't pretty.

 In South Carolina last week during the congressional break, Sen. Lindsey Graham generally avoided crowds. Likewise Sen. Jon Kyl, back home in Arizona, scheduled no public appearances, instead huddling with party officials in Phoenix.

It could not have been an easy week for the two GOP senators, key brokers of the compromise immigration-reform bill that has infuriated so many of their red-state constituents. How well they and other senators in the hot seat endured the heat may become clear when the Senate resumes debate on the bill this week – and whether the amendments to come are designed mainly to alter it or, rather, to kill it.

The week at home made one thing evident: Senators who back this measure, especially Republicans, are taking a calculated risk.

To some, they are traitors and sellouts, offering "amnesty" to illegal immigrants who broke the law by crossing into the US. Angry constituents promise repercussions at the ballot box, and political analysts say those are not empty threats.

"Among a lot of Republicans, there's been intensely negative reaction directed against the Republican senators who have been involved with [the bill]," says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta and coauthor of the book "Divided America." Though the Republican senators "are saying that they're actually responsible for most of the conservative parts of the bill, they're not seen that way by their supporters."

To others, Senators Graham, Kyl, and others who've endeavored to repair a broken immigration system are the statesmen of this age – 21st-century John Calhouns determined to forge ahead on resolving a tough issue that, if not as divisive as slavery was 150 years ago, may at least match the fight over abortion for intensity……

……Brett Mecum, spokesman for the Arizona Republican Party, says that from May 21 through May 25 his office received 1,600 calls from Republicans threatening to tear up their membership cards and join other parties. In 12 years in the business, says Mr. Mecum, he's "never seen people try to walk away from the party, this irate over one single issue, as last week here." That volume of calls led Randy Pullen, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, to call a press conference to say that the Arizona GOP opposes the proposed law.

"Our research shows that [Kyl and Graham] are delusional if they think that the Republican base, the conservative base, is happy with that bill," says Matt Towery, CEO of Insider Advantage, a nonpartisan polling firm in Atlanta. "I think they're trying to talk themselves into believing that, but it's not working."Adds Mr. Towery, "Will certain Republicans lose a percentage of their core base over this? At least temporarily, yes. Will it make them more vulnerable? Yes."

The focus of this article is on the Republicans, but there is one, tiny little sentence that bears attention:

The only real public support Kyl has received so far has come from Arizona's Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, who wrote an op-ed calling the legislation a good start. Democratic lawmakers, for their part, are also feeling the heat. Illegal immigration "is a complex problem – it cuts at our core values of what it means to be American, part of which is being fair and at the same time not getting a free ride," says US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) of Arizona, who has held constituent meetings throughout her 9,000-square-mile district that includes the busy border crossing at Douglas. (Emphasis added)

I think this will damage every Senator up for reelection in 2008 who supports it, regardless of party. And, yet again, for the record, I believe that if the government addresses the border first, the rest can be dealt with. But that is the only way this is going to be palatable to the vast majority of voters in this country. There have been too many broken promises for the voters to believe that the tough talk about borders isn't being undermined by other provisions in the monster bill the Senate has produced. Here's an idea: break the border security provisions out into a separate companion bill and make that bill tough, easy to understand and legislatively bullet-proof. (In other words, make sure it cannot be undermined by provisions in the rest of the "compromise." Do that and maybe you can, in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, save your phony-baloney jobs. If not, the closing line of the article should give Senators - regardless of party - pause: "But for every one of these senators … this is a very dangerous piece of legislation."