Politico
March 17, 2008

The hot-button issue of immigration doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon – at least not in Republican circles.

On NPR’s “Morning Edition” today, John McCain suggested that strong anti-immigrant rhetoric contributed to two recent, high-profile GOP Congressional losses – of former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who badly lost to Sen. Bob Casey in 2006, and Jim Oberweis, who lost the heavily Republican seat of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert this month in a special election.

“I know that there have been some races, like here in Pennsylvania, where Senator Santorum emphasized that issue [immigration] and lost by a large number,” McCain said on NPR.

“We just had a loss of Denny Hastert’s seat out in Illinois. The Republican candidate out there, I am told, had very strong anti-immigrant rhetoric also, so I would hope that many of our Republican candidates would understand the political practicalities of this issue.”

McCain campaigned for Oberweis last month, helping the campaign raise about $257,000. Oberweis will be on the ballot again in November, against Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.)

During the campaign, Oberweis proposed his own plan to crack down on illegal immigration, and aired a television ad arguing that politicians in Washington “can’t seem to fix” the problem.
Joseph Granville and Robert Stovall, octogenarians who’ve seen every financial market downturn since the 1950s, say the current one may be the worst and is far from over.

Granville, born in 1923, remembers his banker father’s bad moods following the stock-market crash of 1929. The younger Granville began his career at defunct brokerage E.F. Hutton in 1957, quit in 1963 to begin publishing a weekly newsletter and wrote nine books on investing.

“We’re in a crash,” Granville, 84, said in a telephone interview from Kansas City, Missouri, where he lives and works. “This is the worst I’ve seen, and I’ve studied every bit of history all my life.”

U.S. stocks plunged to the lowest since July 2006 today after JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. for less than a 10th of its market value sent financial shares falling around the world. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index neared a so-called bear market drop of 20 percent from its Oct. 9 record.

Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest securities firm and once the biggest underwriter of U.S. mortgage bonds, collapsed as the residential real-estate slump led to bank losses approaching $200 billion globally.

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