Cheap shots and chasers 4/20

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie denied newspaper reports that he fell asleep during a recent Bruce Springsteen concert, saying he closed his eyes while having a “spiritual” moment during the song “Rocky Ground.” (Bloomberg, 4/19/2012)

Christie gets spiritual at Springsteen concerts? Eew.

I've often wondered how a fat cat goes to the church of his choice, hears all about the Sermon on the Mount, and comes out spiritually uplifted and energized to get back to screwing the poor. Christie's Brucism must be a little like that guy's Christianity.

Proposed interior, Los Angeles Roman Catholic Cathedral. From The Poor Church of the Rich and the Rich Church of the Poor.

The Center for Immigration Studies has released a study purporting to show that undocumented immigrants should go home for environmental reasons, because their carbon footprints in the US are four times as big as they would be in their own countries. Think Progress notes that the methodology is a little weird:

The report claims that a person’s CO2 emissions is directly related to his or her personal income — so a person making $110,000 per year will emit 10 percent more carbon than a person who earns $100,000 per year under the report’s methodology. Thus, because the report claims that each Mexican immigrant earns 53.2 percent of the average U.S. resident, it claims that these immigrants must also produce 53.2 percent of the carbon emissions. 

If there really was such a correlation, of course, getting rid of the immigrants wouldn't be the best way to deal with it—on the contrary, we need more! Most urgent, though, would be to ship more rich people to Mexico.

You could be burning next to no carbon at all! AP photo by Guillermo Arias.

Speaking of immigrants, Willard Mitt Romney has been speaking of them too, and spreading the word that he'd really like a way of getting some of those Hispanic votes just at the same time, as Digby points out, as young Senator Rubio is touting a kind of American DayDREAM act, with a path for immigrants toward the general vicinity of citizenship but careful not to get too close, if you know what I mean. (Is it starting to smell like cilantro in here?)

Digby thinks Romney is going to try to "thread the needle" of satisfying a decent quantity of Latino voters without giving apoplexy to his know-nothing nativist base. This plays into what I was saying the other day, about Romney's use of the attribution error to allow him to propose large early troop withdrawals from Afghanistan while rabidly denouncing Obama's proposals for large early troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. He could propose virtually the same DREAM act as Obama but he'd still say Obama's was socialist, and un-American, and cowardly and lazy and undignified and so on, because that's what Romney does!