One of John McCain’s Hispanic surrogates forcefully said Barack Obama is deceitfully inflating his role in the Senate on immigration reform for political benefit.

Prompting this criticism is a claim Obama made before the League of United Latin American Citizens. “I reached across the aisle in the Senate to fight for comprehensive immigration reform,” Obama told the immigration advocates in a speech Tuesday.

 “He was AWOL!” Diaz-Balart said. “I remember when Senator McCain came over here and met with House leadership and he met with the Chairman at that time of the Judiciary, Sensenbrenner here in the House to move this issue. To move the issue forward in meeting after meeting where a number of us in the House where there in the Senate, with multiple senators from both parties, by the way. Senator Obama was nowhere to be seen! He was absolutely AWOL.”

“The reality of the matter is that he has never worked on the issue except he did team up with an anti-immigrant senator, Mr. Dorgan to kill a very important leg of that legislation, the temporary worker program,” Diaz-Balart said.

 The bill Obama is attempting to take credit for was sponsored by McCain and Democratic Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D.-Mass.)

Jack Tapper of ABC News explained Obama’s minor role in the debate on his blog. The relevant part of his explanation is below.

There was a cohesive bipartisan group led by Sens. McCain and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, that worked to defeat amendments that would hurt the overall bill's chance of final passage -- amendments that were too liberal for the Republicans and too conservative for the Democrats. And on at least five occasions, Obama voted for amendments against the wishes of the bipartisan group, including Kennedy.

These included an amendment Obama offered that would have sunsetted the merit-based evaluation system for immigrants after five years; two amendments from Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-ND, to sunset both the temporary guest worker visa program and the Y-1 non-immigrant temporary worker visa program after five years; and two amendments from Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, that would have removed the requirement that 'Y' non-immigrant visa holders leave the United States before they are able to renew their visa, and would have lowered the annual visa quota for guest workers from 400,000 to 200,000 per year.

Obama voted for all five; Kennedy voted against all five.

“WHAT HE DID TO GET THAT MONEY”

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) earned universal praise with his prodigious philanthropy – building more than 3,000 public libraries in 47 states (and nations around the world), founding Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (C.I.T.), establishing Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and much more. Anti-business bias, however, leads many observers to speculate that he turned to charity in order to assuage his guilt over his success as a Captain of Industry. For a 1999 PBS “American Experience” program about the impoverished Scottish immigrant who became “The Richest Man in the World,” his biographer, Joseph Frazier Wall suggested: “Maybe with the giving away of his money, he would justify what he had done to get that money.”

And what had he done, exactly?

When Carnegie retired at age 66 (and sold his business to J.P. Morgan and associates to create the vast new company “U.S. Steel”) he employed 31,162 full-time workers at three major mills. His organizational genius helped create the steel business that played a crucial role in American industrialization and prosperity. However laudable his charitable endeavors (he managed to give away nearly all his money before he died at 83), the creation of jobs and wealth in his business career benefited his countrymen even more.  

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released its Monthly Budget Review, and not to my surprise it stated “The federal government incurred a deficit of $268 billion for the first nine months of fiscal year 2008, CBO estimates, $148 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period in 2007.”

CBO also estimates that about $79 billion of that change is a direct result of the Economic Stimulus Act that passed the House at the beginning of this year.

We are now seeing the direct effect from reckless spending without reductions elsewhere.  I have said it before and I will say it now, both Republicans and Democrats need to understand that if we continue on our current course we are on a collision course for the highest debt in American history.

What are the most popular stories around the web this morning?  Townhall does the surfing so you don't have to.

New York Post:  A-Rod Went Over the Borderline

Denver Post:  $31 Million, All We Got Was a Lousy Tulo

Chicago Tribune:  Jacobson Sues Channel 2