Thursday Roundup: Cornyn Gets Nothing Done, Makes News

Cornyn got a chance to get his immigrant hating on Wednesday night, when he made national news with his attempt to kill the Senate immigration bill by way of amendment. And he had as much net effectiveness in the Senate as he normally does — which is to say, not much. It was a rough night for the compromise immigration bill, which has already seen some rough days and will see more ahead of it. Cornyn's attempt to not grant eligibility to those who have returned to the United States after being deported — estimated at 635,000 people — failed, as did a Democratic attempt to make available some green cards to family members of those already legally in the US, and an amendment by Sen. Obama that would've added a five-year sunset clause for the merit-based immigration system. It will be interesting to see what the House will do with this bill — assuming it gets out of the Senate, of course.

Opinions are still flying on winners and losers in Tuesday's Republican candidate debate. CNN, who hosted the debate, gets the nod for Most Obvious Analysis Results in their story on it, titled "GOP debaters keep distance from Bush." As if we expected otherwise. I would put money on there having been a heart-to-heart between the White House and the rest of the Republican leadership well before debates started, where they told Bush, "listen, you're the C in C and all, you do what you like, and we can try to throw you a bone here and there by stonewalling Congressional Democrats every once in a while, but publicly, we pretty much have to throw you under the bus, savvy?"

If you liked Chris Dodd's "talk clock" for the Democratic debate, and are curious as to how the Republicans fared on talk time, you'll be happy to know that they tracked talk time for this last debate as well. You may be surprised at the winner of the Talk Time wars. Though with the softballs he lobbed, perhaps he's mulling over a run for the Republican candidacy himself. You heard it here first, folks.

Seriously, I'm all for having the all of the Democratic candidate debates on CNN and the Republican debates on MSNBC from now on. It seems that having commentators who lean slightly against the candidates leads to candidates being pushed to give real answers more often, and thus to more interesting debate.

Travis County is continuing a push against the Texas Association of Business that they started last year. Prosecutors allege that the TAB used funds to run political ads with the purpose of electing candidates along with Tom DeLay's political committee. Of course, they didn't explicitly state support for or against a candidate, and that seems to be what the case hinges on — especially after the presiding judge, Mike Lynch, basically denied a jury decision in dismissing the TAB's indictment last year. In light of that, chances for success there look grim.

Finally today, some interesting news on the science front: the Chron covers three labs that have effectively created embryonic stem cells from regular mouse skin cells. Many are hopeful that this work can be quickly replicated with human skin cells. If it can, we can all kiss one of the primary religious wedge issues goodbye. That's probably a good thing, considering how much religion is being bandied about this election cycle — the fewer "Democrats are evil" issues the Republicans can use to polarize their base against us, the better. I think the Democratic panel on faith and religion shows that there are a lot of potential pickups among disaffected religious voters that no longer think Republicans are good representatives of their faith. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing a lot of those voting Democratic come 2008.