Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, two of the standard bearers of the Tea Party movement, have introduced a series of amendments to the Senate immigration reform bill.

These amendments almost certainly won't become law, but they provide a model for opposing the impressively lax border security and employment verification enforcement provisions of Rubio/Schumer's invitation for future waves of unauthorized immigration.

Ignore the awkward metaphors, casual humblebrags (note my emphasis below), and overly positive ending paragraph. This Tom Friedman column is important because it details the conflict point of the 21st century: water.

Democracy? Not so fast, say Pakistan's religious minorities: the 4% who are non-Muslim, and the additional 10-15% who profess the Shi'ite version of Islam.

Intolerance has been on the rise for the past five years under Pakistan’s democratically elected government because of the growing violence of Islamic radicals, who are then courted by political parties, say many in the country’s communities of Shiite Muslims, Christians, Hindus and other minorities.

On Saturday, the country will elect a new parliament, marking the first time one elected government is replaced by another in the history of Pakistan, which over its 66-year existence has repeatedly seen military rule. But minorities are not celebrating. Some of the fiercest Islamic extremists are candidates in the vote, and minorities say even the mainstream political parties pander to radicals to get votes, often campaigning side-by-side with well-known militants.

More than a dozen representatives of Pakistan’s minorities interviewed by The Associated Press expressed fears the vote will only hand more influence to extremists. Since the 2008 elections, under the outgoing government led by the left-leaning Pakistan People’s Party, sectarian attacks have been relentless and minorities have found themselves increasingly targeted by radical Islamic militants. Minorities have little faith the new election will change that.

Don't get too excited (really, don't), but Russia and the United States are seeking to initiate peace talks between Syria's rebels and government forces. Reports the New York Times:

From the Appalachian Trail back to Congress. Shameful. 

If you're buying farmland as a short to medium-term investment, you're probably about to lose a lot of money:

There's a core of a true idea in Dennis Prager's National Review Online column today urging an end to the Los Angeles school district's free-breakfast program. Pause to tally how many nutrition programs there are in the United States:

* Food stamps (known formally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program);

* WIC, a feeding program for expectant mothers;

David Brooks takes off the boxing gloves today.

The opponents of immigration reform have many small complaints, but they really have one core concern. It’s about control. America doesn’t control its borders. Past reform efforts have not established control. Current proposals wouldn’t establish effective control. But the opponents rarely say what exactly it is they are trying to control. They talk about border security and various mechanisms to achieve that, but they rarely go into detail about what we should be so vigilant about restricting. I thought I would spell it out.

What David then spells out is not very flattering. In fact, in his telling, the opponents of the Senate immigration plan seem a bunch of dummies, trying to stop love & prosperity & progress.

I happen to have one of those opponents right with here with me as I write, living conveniently inside my head. And I can tell you what he wants to control: he wants to control the accelerating drift of the United States toward becoming an ever more class-divided, wealth-concentrated society while also preserving the dynamic, private-enterprise character of the American economy.

David, I think you are cherry-picking the years of comparison. PRIOR to 1930, you cannot seriously argue that the immigrants coming here were better-educated than the native-born. Just go check out the archives at Ellis Island. Also, too: social benefits basically DIDN'T EXIST before FDR decided that letting 2/3 of the citizenry starve in the streets was a really bad idea, and came up with the NEW DEAL. Oh, and there was this big, honking WAR in there, where we picked up all those refugees from Europe. Medicare didn't exist prior to 1965. And so on and so forth.

On C-SPAN this morning, Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake shut down an anti-Israel conspiracy nutter, who said "Lindsey Graham and John McCain, these are all, pretty much talking heads for the Dick Cheney neocon wing of let’s go to war for the greater glory and good of Israel."

Eli's response is priceless.

Former Republican Michael Bloomberg must have decided the best way to help Republicans take back the Senate is by creating a Democratic Tea Party.

In a modern social insurance state, all of us are both contributors and beneficiaries.

We pay taxes. We receive schooling, Medicare, and Social Security. We are eligible for Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, low-income housing vouchers, and so on and on.

When the United States chooses to admit somebody as a resident, it accepts a fiscal bargain. The newcomer promises to contribute; the newcomer is entitled to receive.

How will that bargain balance?

The Washington Post reports on an intriguing new study on "ultra-conserved words," holdovers from our common ancestral tongue:

Mother Jones' Timothy Murphy, in an article wondering where the Boston terrorist will be buried, recounts how cities have historically dealth with society's least beloved:

Chris Christie, the most popular Republican in the United States, finally decided being morbidly obese was unacceptable. Good.