And I've always taken you to be sufficiently intelligent to respond with something more articulate that "you're wrong", but I guess that remains to be seen.

Citizenship should not be doled out to anyone who makes its across the border. That said, most of the illegals here are not committing crimes and are otherwise productive members of society. Privatize the schools and privatize health care and you get rid of any drain they may be causing. What's left is they become productive members of society like anyone else here legal and illegal. End the useless war on drugs and most of the criminal element will leave the country.

Make life difficult for everyone who is here illegally but productive and they will leave to another state taking their money and the labor. That will leave us with the criminals and nothing else.

Why reread the First Amendment? You just need to look at Sharia which uses the same reasoning in the article you link to in order to justify covering ALL parts of a woman's body in public.

Something like AZ's law will likely pass here because it is such a political football. And after we pass a law like this with its dubious constitutionality, we can guarantee the following will happen:

* Every police department in the state will ask for a bigger budget and more officers to enforce these laws. Officers may be more tempted to spend all day questioning people who "look illegal" rather than patrolling dangerous neighborhoods.
* School taxes will continue to rise unabated even with fewer children of illegal immigrants in the schools for the same reasons school taxes have always gone up.
* Health care costs will continue to rise unabated and hospitals will continue to go broke even with fewer illegals using emergency room medical care. This is already abused by plenty of legal citizens and as the economy worsens more people will have no choice but to do the same.
* The relatively small criminal element of those who are here illegally will continue to break the law and ignore these new laws.
* Illegals who are here currently earning a regular living will leave the state in droves like they are doing in Arizona, dramatically reducing the aggregate demand for housing, food, clothing, etc. and they will take their money elsewhere causing real estate prices to crash even further and more local businesses to fail.
* Food prices will shoot through the roof as farmers will have to pay higher wages than current market levels and have difficulty finding enough labor to fulfill their needs, causing food shortages for several products and also raising prices.
* Every other sector of the economy that employs illegal immigrants will see prices shoot through the roof for the same reasons.
* We will see even more laws passed to fix the problems created by these new laws after they are passed.

Shut it down. Like most government run institutions it is corrupt to the core, incompetently run, and a giant drain of money. It's main purpose, socializing the cost of college education, is also completely unnecessary. The subsidies have only encouraged colleges to keep raising tuition levels to match education subsidies from the state and feds thereby completely negating their effect. The world never has and never will suffer from a lack of Art History, Poly Sci, and French Literature majors. We don't need to keep subsidizing their creation on the backs of current and future taxpayers.

Great press release and spin. Leaving aside the fact that taking money from one set of people who earned and giving to another who didn't, let along throwing a party with it, is just flat out immoral, the "public-private partnerships" you mention means the coercive taking money out of private hands and the local economy in another part of the state and distributing it in Philadelphia based on the decisions of the political class. Wouldn't that money have just as likely created jobs and improved the community in the places from which it was confiscated? Don't those communities now suffer because there are fewer dollars being spent on local merchants? Is Philadelphia the only part of the state that has suffered an economic downturn since the 1970s?

What's a better mechanism for creating jobs, people spending their own money and giving business owners immediate feedback on the goods and services they want at what prices based on the market or politicians taking money from one part of the state and giving it to political donors and friends based on, well, nothing except maybe what the politician thinks is in their best interest? Which system creates a sustainable economic model for growth and change and which gives an artificial sense of prosperity and improvement until the money runs out and the government then has to extricate another large sum from taxpayers to keep the party going?

Philadelphia will fail economically and continue to fail if its model for economic prosperity is patronage using OPM from other parts of the state. Laputa on the Delaware.

What we need are soccer stadiums with full gambling facilities in every county. Each stadium will contain various state stores that sell alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics with a 50% markup. There will be Amsterdam-style neon light prostitute booths throughout each level. While performing their duties, the prostitutes will be required to discuss how poorly public school teachers and state employee are paid and how small their pensions are compared to federal employees.

"part-time citizens Legislature a ‘terrible idea’"

Perhaps almost as bad as having the largest full-time legislature in the country.

Ethics training! Brilliant! Because people wouldn't know otherwise that taking bribes in exchange for incarcerating people is wrong.

I bet they've already rigged the bids for whose firm gets to conduct the training.

The #1 problem of the legislature is that they have too much power and do just about everything except pass actual legislation. Most of what they do consists of regulating and taxing individuals and businesses to the point of unprofitably and then redistributing wealth to political donors, allies, and their favored voting blocks. No reform is meaningful unless it limits the power of the state government and we elect judges who will enforce those limits. If the state's power to redistribute wealth and interfere in our economic and social lives is curtailed, then it doesn't matter as much how many power hungry sycophantic baboons the party machines select for us every two years.

And if you say anything different, he'll subpoena you...