Common Core means federal control of school curriculum, i.e., control by Obama administration left-wing bureaucrats. Federal control will replace all curriculum decisions by state and local school boards, state legislatures, parents and even Congress because Obama bypassed Congress by using $4 billion of Stimulus money to promote Common Core.

It’s not only public schools that must obey the fed’s dictates. Common Core will control the curriculum of charter schools, private schools, religious schools, Catholic schools and homeschooling.

The control mechanism is the tests. Kids must pass the tests to get a high school diploma, admittance to college, or a GED. If they haven’t studied a curriculum based on Common Core, they won’t score well on the tests.

Common Core cannot be described as voluntary. Since CC is so costly to the states (estimated at $15 billion for each state for retraining teachers and purchase of computers for all kids to take the tests), CC is foisted on the locals by a combination of bribes, federal handouts and as the price for getting a waiver to exempt a state from other obnoxious mandates such as No Child Left Behind.

Don’t be under any illusion that Common Core will make kids smarter. The Common Core academic level is lower than what many states use now, and the math standards are so inferior that the only real mathematician on the validation committee refused to sign off on the math standards.

He said the CC standards are two years behind international expectations by the 8th grade, and fall further behind in grades 8 to 12. The CC math standards downgrade the years when algebra and geometry are to be taught.

Parents will have a hard time helping their children with their math homework. CC standards call for teaching kids to add columns of figures from left to right instead of right to left.

CC advocates claim that the new standards will make students college-ready. That promise is a play on words: Students will be ready only to enter a two-year nonselective community college.

Don’t miss Phyllis Schlafly’s latest book, now available at the WND Superstore: “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom”

Common Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving government the right to share and exchange this information with other government and private agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits that. This type of surveillance and control of individuals is the mark of a totalitarian government.

Common Core reminds us of how Communist China gathered personal information on all its schoolchildren, stored it in manila folders called dangans and then turned the file over to the kid’s employer when he left school.

The New York Times once published a picture of a giant Chinese warehouse containing hundreds of thousands of these folders. That was in the pre-Internet era when information was stored on paper; now data collection and storage are efficiently managed on computers in a greater invasion of privacy.

Common Core is encrusted with lies. It is not, as advertised, “state” written; it is a national project created in secret without any input from teachers or state legislatures. It is not “internationally benchmarked”; that never happened.

The readings assigned in the CC English standards are 50 percent “informational” texts instead of great American and English literature and classics. The result is that CC standards are very political.

The suggested readings include a sales talk for government health care (such as Obamacare) and global warming propaganda (including a push for Agenda 21). Some of the fiction suggested is worthless and even pornographic, presumably chosen to reflect contemporary life. Another suggested reading favorably describes Fidel Castro and his associates without any indication they are tyrants, Communists and mass murderers.

We should take a bit of advice from our neighbor to the north. Canada has no national standards (all standards are adopted locally) and not even a national Department of Education.

CC advocates admit the standards cannot be changed or errors corrected because they are already printed and copyrighted by the private owners such as the Gates Foundation. Bills to repeal CC have been filed in Oklahoma, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, South Dakota and Georgia, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence just signed a law to “pause” the CC implementation and hold public hearings.

Baucus’ apt metaphor is being echoed by other Democrats because it is so obviously true. Harry Reid said, “I agree with him”; Sen. Jay Rockefeller described it as “so complicated” that it’s “beyond comprehension”; Henry Chao, the government’s chief technical officer in charge of implementing the exchanges, said, “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

The outcry over the length of the 21-page application form (with a 61-page instruction manual) resulted in a cosmetic shortening. The same nosy questions are now asked on three separate forms (of 3, 5 and 12 pages) plus three appendices, plus a requirement that families with more than one child must “make a copy of pages 4 and 5 and complete” for each additional child.

Most states have repudiated key aspects of this misguided law, with the result that our nation is divided between about 16 “Obamacare states” and 34 states that respect individual liberty. Every state in the South, from Virginia through Texas, has rejected a central part of Obamacare by declining to increase its Medicaid rolls, despite the promise of massive federal handouts.

The official name of Obamacare is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but this law is turning out to be neither protective of patients nor affordable. The American public was promised that we could keep our insurance and physicians, but in fact many millions will lose their health insurance and access to their own physicians.

Don’t miss Phyllis Schlafly’s latest book, now available at the WND Superstore: “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom”

Several Republican governors caved in to pressure by the media and the hospital industry to embrace the costly Medicaid expansion, but then they were embarrassed by their own Republican state legislatures, which rejected this boondoggle. Medicaid spends billions on administrative costs and only a small percentage on quality medical care, so this inefficient program should be trimmed not expanded.

Obamacare is causing reductions in hours worked and paychecks for many Americans as businesses seek to reduce their Obamacare penalties by decreasing the number of employees who work 30 hours or more a week. Companies having at least 50 full-time-equivalent employees must purchase expensive health insurance or else pay $2,000 or more in fines for each employee who works at least 30 hours a week.

Many businesses have decided to pay these fines rather than buy costly insurance for services, such as abortion-inducing drugs, that they do not even want. Government-approved health insurance policies will not cover many of the services people can buy now with their own Health Savings Accounts.

Obamacare’s much-publicized health insurance exchanges, supposedly designed to make insurance more affordable, have been a bust. Two-thirds of states have declined to set up exchanges, and taxpayer costs have ballooned to $5.7 billion for the federal government to establish them.

It seems doubtful the Obama administration will comply with Obamacare by the date it is scheduled to become fully effective, Jan. 1, 2014. At a news conference last week, President Obama failed to reassure us by making this clueless comment: “Anytime you’re implementing something big, there’s going be people who are nervous and anxious about ‘is it going to get done?’ until it’s actually done.”

Headlines proclaim the stock market’s new record highs, but the average American paycheck and fringe benefits are lagging far behind due to Obamacare. Obamacare is causing retail stores to reduce hours (and paychecks) for their employees at the fastest rate in more than 30 years, in order to avoid penalties.

While politicians brag that employment has increased by 1 percent over the last year in retail, the total hours worked has actually fallen by 0.9 percent during that same period. Employee fringe benefits in the service sector fell sharply in the first quarter for the first time in more than a decade.

A significant portion of the increase in overall employment is in temporary workers who are increasingly used by businesses to reduce Obamacare’s penalties. Obamacare is causing a shift in private employment to less desirable temporary jobs and jobs of shorter hours.

Many young people who voted for Obama are in for a surprise when they realize how much Obamacare will cost them. College students in New Jersey face an increase in insurance costs from a few hundred dollars annually to $1,700 or more, so Democrats have rushed to repeal a New Jersey law that requires college students to buy health insurance.

A narrow vote in the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Obamacare last summer by calling it a tax, even though Americans were repeatedly told by Democrats that it was not a tax. As bad as new taxes are, this Obamacare train wreck is even worse than a tax.

They came into the United States as visitors from Kazakhstan, where many ethnic Chechens live without persecution, then cooked up a claim to be refugees, which was a fraud. After a few years the father returned to Dagestan, Russia, where he now lives safely.

Once admitted into the United States, the entire family cashed in on generous U.S. welfare benefits, cash and food stamps. Those receiving taxpayer handouts included the two criminal sons, both of their parents and ultimately Tamerlan’s wife and child.

Tamerlan can be said to have financed his radicalization with welfare handouts from our taxpayers. Those were the years when Tamerlan became a more devout Muslim, gave up drinking to devote himself to “God’s business” and sought out jihadist websites.

When accused of domestic violence against a girlfriend in 2009, he had the benefit of a taxpayer-funded attorney to get his case dismissed. Welfare was terminated only in 2012 when his wife’s salary pushed their income outside of eligibility limits.

Why did our government ignore the federal law that requires immigrants, before they are admitted, to prove they will not become a public charge? For years, the sons did not have jobs or any visible source of income.

Meanwhile, Tamerlan’s mother began wearing a hijab and telling conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which she said Tamerlan had told her. She was accused of shoplifting $1,500 worth of clothes from the upscale Lord & Taylor, but flew back to Russia, so the judge issued a bench warrant for her arrest.

The government of Russia contacted our FBI and warned us that Tamerlan was a dangerous risk. The FBI investigated, but reported there was no problem.

In 2012, Tamerlan left for a six-month visit in Russia and Dagestan. Where did Tamerlan get the money for that expensive airline ticket? Wasn’t the FBI interested in where he went and who he saw, even after Russia told us that he joined “underground groups in Russia”?

What did Tamerlan do in Russia? Receive training in bomb-making, terrorist tactics, or handling weapons? Did he attend a radical mosque? Were the brothers directed by foreign operatives?

Don’t miss Phyllis Schlafly’s latest book, now available at the WND Superstore: “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom”

One of the government’s ridiculous excuses for not tracking Tamerlan’s flight to Russia was that the airline misspelled his name on passenger list. The Obama administration is always blaming someone else for its own failures.

Apparently, the FBI wasn’t interested in doing another investigation when Tamerlan returned from his trip. Russia then took its warning about Tamerlan to our Central Intelligence Agency, but got no response there, either.

Tamerlan’s own Web postings showed his sympathies with radical Islam, and in April 2013, Tamerlan’s YouTube video account included a playlist celebrating “Terrorists.” Because the FBI had closed his case, no one in our government was watching.

When the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was naturalized as a citizen, he would have been required to swear that he renounces “all allegiance” to any previous country and that “I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” What did our naturalization bureaucrats do to assure that Dzhokhar was not using the Quran-authorized practice of taqiyya, i.e., tell a lie in order to advance Muslim objectives?

Why didn’t our FBI recognize the signal that the older boy was named for one of the most brutal murderers in all history? The name Tamerlan is known throughout Asia as a 14th-century Muslim who called himself the “Sword of Islam” and murdered 17 million people, beheaded many and displayed their heads to showcase his brutality.

The Boston bombing requires us to stop thinking about new immigration legislation until we remedy our mistakes. The failure to protect us from the Tsarnaev brothers proves there are so many things radically wrong with our legal immigration process.

Sen, Rand Paul, R-Ky., wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that “We should not proceed until we understand the specific failures of our immigration system.” Paul’s letter cautioned, “National security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform” to prevent future acts of terror.

The failed FBI investigation of Tamerlan shows that our government does not have the capacity to do adequate background checks on 11 million illegal aliens. Amnesty may even facilitate terrorism. We need to take Ronald Reagan’s advice: Before we do more of what we are doing, let’s find out if what we are doing is part of the problem.

For starters, why would our government have admitted the Tsarnaev family whose son was named Tamerlan? That should have been a red alert because that is the name of one of the world’s notorious mass murderers, a 14th-century Central Asian warlord named Tamerlan, who killed about 17 million people.

The original Tamerlan was a devout Muslim who referred to himself as the Sword of Islam and was especially known for his shocking brutality. His name is well-known in Central Asia.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said that the Boston bombers’ crime poses questions similar to those we asked after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, such as “How did 19 people get in here to kill 3,000 people?” He said the Boston marathon crime is “a reminder that we’ve got to do better than what we’ve done. They were evidently here legally.”

Grassley said the Boston crime should trigger the U.S. “to understand the gaps and loopholes in our immigration system.” He asked, “How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?”

The left-wing politicians and media outlets are disappointed with the outcome of the investigation into the Boston bombing. They can’t blame it on lack of gun control, the NRA, the tea parties, right-wing extremists, or budget cutbacks required by sequestration.

Salon columnist David Sirota wrote, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” What he may have meant, of course, is that he hoped the bomber would be a mainstream Christian American so the atrocity could be blamed on the American culture.

What worries America-hating liberals and progressives is that we will wake up to the fact that our government is now importing refugees, Muslims, polygamists and other difficult-to-assimilate foreigners in unprecedented numbers. From a distance, rebels in Chechnya, Syria and Egypt might seem like freedom fighters, but they may be terrorists who have no desire to be American.

Don’t miss Phyllis Schlafly’s latest book, now available at the WND Superstore: “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom”

It’s long overdue for Congress to have a series of hearings on the loopholes, broken promises and disobeyed laws involving both legal and illegal entry into the United States. It would be useful to reinstate the House Committee on Un-American Activities so we can have a look at those in our midst who may be jihadists, dupes of violent Muslim indoctrination, or (in old Communist lingo) fellow travelers or useful idiots.

We need hearings to find out why the Tsarnaev family was not thoroughly vetted before it was admitted to our country, or even after Russia tipped off our FBI that Tamerlan could be a dangerous risk, or especially before Tamerlan was re-admitted to the U.S. after his trip to Russia in 2012. Russia told the FBI that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

Dealing with the widespread fraud in our easy acceptance of refugees should also be part of comprehensive immigration reform. After all, the Tsarnaev family came into our country as refugees.

The vetting of immigrants should make sure that the applicant really wants to become an American. The immigrants of earlier generations, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc., certainly did want to be Americans; like Irving Berlin, their attitude was God Bless America.

There is plenty of evidence that legal and illegal immigrants of various nationalities, in contravention of our citizenship pledge, retain their loyalty to the land they came from. Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington, says, “I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where Americans turn to violent jihad – are you American first or are you Muslim first?”

Our government should investigate thoroughly and reject those who do not want to become Americans, obey our Constitution and laws, speak our language, and salute our flag. And they have to accept the rule that disputes in our courts must be decided according to U.S. law, not any foreign law.

The highly paid lobbyists assigned to this issue are split. Big business interests (chanting “let the market decide”) are trying to bring in as many low-paid workers as possible, while the unions want to save jobs for their members and votes for the Democrats.

H-1B visas are capped at 65,000 and are supposed to be for jobs that require technical expertise (scientists, engineers, computer programmers) and be used when U.S. citizens are not available. Business welcomes the crush of applicants from Indian body shops (i.e., placement agencies), and the top 10 users of H-1Bs are offshore outsourcing firms.

Asians make up half of San Jose’s technology workforce, according to November Census Bureau data. That’s a sharp rise from 10 years ago when it was about 39 percent.

Employers prefer to hire foreigners because they are paid less, can’t quit and are treated like indentured servants. Guest workers are supposed to go back home when their visas expire, but we have no guarantee that they depart.

The wage differential is significant. In New York City, the prevailing wage for an entry-level computer systems engineer is $68,370, but is $120,037 for a fully competent worker. The foreigners are usually hired as entry-level.

The guest worker system explains why college students tell me they have been opting out of engineering and switching to a business major. American student enrollment in graduate Science and Engineering fell 10 percent after 1993, while enrollment of foreigners rose 26 percent.

Estimates are that at least 50 percent and as many as 70 or 80 percent of our nation’s agriculture workers are here illegally. Guest worker shepherds brought in from Peru to tend U.S. sheep just “disappeared” to hunt for better jobs.

According to Sen. Jeff Sessions’ “10 Questions for the Gang of Eight,” the U.S. allows 700,000 guest workers to enter our country each year. He estimates that the Gang’s proposal will increase the number to over a million a year, not counting the legalization of those now illegally in the U.S. and anticipated future immigration. Business is now demanding a large new “lesser-skilled” guest worker category to take retailing and janitorial jobs.

Economist Jared Bernstein, in his book “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?” accuses the guest worker program of being a power play by the business class and a disruption of the free market that actually shifts wealth to the powerful. The free market is supposed to let prices and wages rise whenever there is a shortage, but that doesn’t happen when our government artificially nullifies any shortage by bringing in more lower-paid workers.

The guest worker system is hurting black Americans, too. Yolanda Lewis, president and CEO of the Oakland-based Black Economic Council, stated bluntly, Tech companies “do not want to employ Americans. They import labor from overseas, pushing for H-1B visas. Check the job boards. They basically say, ‘H-1B Visa. Americans need not apply.’ For years, women, blacks and Latinos have been kept out of the tech job market. Now white men are being forced to train their replacements.”

H-4 visas are given to spouses of all classes of H-visa holders: H-1B, farm workers (H-2A) and non-agricultural unskilled workers (H-2B). There were 74,205 H-4s issued in 2011, and it’s been estimated that the total population of H-4s (which is not counted by the government) is roughly a quarter million.

When President Obama took an unexpected question from a woman whose engineer husband is unemployed, Obama replied, “Industry tells me that they don’t have enough highly skilled engineers.” Census Bureau data show that there are 1.8 million U.S.-born engineers under age 65 who are unemployed or not working as engineers.

Other industries are using H-1B visas for jobs for which there is obviously no shortage of Americans, such as teachers. Prince George’s County in Maryland was discovered to have 10 percent of its teaching staff working with H-1B visas, and the Muslim charter schools imported hundreds of teachers from Turkey on H-1B visas.

The House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy discovered that H-1B visas were even used to hire fashion models, dancers, chefs, photographers and social workers. The Government Accountability Office found that the government approved more than a million H-1B visas to foreign nationals from 13 “countries of concern” (withholding the countries’ names for security reasons).

And don’t forget J-1 visas that take summer jobs that have traditionally been so important to young people, giving them an opportunity to learn the work ethic. Now summer jobs go to seasonal hiring of foreign students.

That is the text of Section 212 of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. The Gang of Eight appears to be willing to allow those who illegally entered the U.S. to obtain legal residence without demonstrating that they will not become a public charge, and after they get a green card they can access the 79 federal welfare benefits and anti-poverty programs.

The Senate Budget Committee staff estimates that costs to the U.S. taxpayers could be $40 billion a year just for Medicaid and Obamacare. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation believes that the net cost of amnesty would eventually top $2 trillion.

One in three immigrant-headed households already participates in at least one major welfare program. Green card holders are already eligible for Medicaid, TANF, Supplemental Security Income, child care assistance, food stamps and a variety of other welfare benefits and public aid programs.

Who will protect the taxpayers against this gigantic raid on our money and our children’s future?

A second roadblock on the way to success for the Gang of Eight is the public’s demand than the route to legalization absolutely must include border security in order to prevent the entry of a new flood of illegals. But Homeland Security officials just told Congress that they still don’t have any way to effectively measure border security.

Three years ago, the Obama administration scrapped the yardstick that was supposed to measure how many miles of the border are under “operational control.” But top Customs and Border Protection officials told Congress in March that the new system they are now working on won’t be ready for use any time in the near future.

A third setback for the Gang of Eight’s amnesty scheme was this week’s front-page headline stating “A sharp drop in job growth sows new concerns.” The average Joe in America can’t support the idea of giving permanent residency to 11 million foreign job-seekers when our own labor-force participation is lower than it’s been in 25 years.

Do we really need more high-school dropouts looking for U.S. jobs? Don’t we have enough Americans trying to support their families who can’t find full-time jobs or jobs that pay as well as the jobs they held 10 years ago? Why should available jobs go to aliens who broke our laws instead of to American citizens?

A fourth difficulty for the amnesty crowd is Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy’s chilly brushoff of Sen. Marco Rubio’s call for thorough legislative consideration of any immigration bill, with time for public comment and consideration of amendments. Leahy plans to bypass the usual committee process, hold only a single hearing, and push the bill through the Senate “with all deliberate speed,” which all recognize as woefully inadequate to deal with dozens of amnesty issues such as how legalization of millions of illegals will impact unemployed Americans, the short- and long-term cost to the taxpayers, and metrics for establishing border security.

Leahy appears to be planning to imitate the Nancy Pelosi model of dealing with legislation, namely, the procedure she used to pass Obamacare: First pass the bill, and after that members of Congress and the American public can read it and find out what is in it. We hope Marco Rubio will say, that’s unacceptable.

Another roadblock no one is yet discussing is that, according to a new Rasmussen survey, the majority of American voters (54 percent) do not think potential U.S. citizens should be allowed to maintain any dual citizenship. If you listen to what illegal aliens are saying, it’s rather clear that most plan to retain significant loyalty to their homeland, and some even claim that Mexico rightfully owns our southwest states.

In any discussion of amnesty, it would be a good idea to remind all illegal aliens, especially those waiting for the Gang of Eight to complete their job, that U.S. citizenship requires applicants to swear this solemn oath: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”

That oath requires people claiming U.S. citizenship to abandon all fidelity to their home country. That oath is a good way to sort out the ones who really want to be Americans.

Our enemy then was the fearsome Soviet missile force. Reagan’s steadfast determination to build a U.S. anti-missile defense was why he won the Cold War at Reykjavik (as we now know from revealed Soviet documents) without firing a shot (as Margaret Thatcher famously said).

The propaganda against U.S. anti-missile defense started immediately after Reagan’s 1983 speech with Ted Kennedy ridiculing it as “Star Wars” and continues to this day. The building of an anti-missile system always posed the No. 1 non-negotiable issue between the United States and our enemies and, incomprehensibly, between conservatives and the left.

We now face other enemies. But the left is still dug in behind its opposition to saving American lives by an anti-missile system.

Barack Obama became president spouting the typical left-wing anti-defense policy and dreaming of the fantasy of a nuclear-free world. He seems to think diplomatic talks, combined with his personal charm, can replace peace through strength, but it can’t.

One of President Obama’s first acts was to effectively cancel the final phase of a Europe-based missile defense system because it was vehemently opposed by Russia. He started unilaterally reducing our nuclear deterrent in the hope our enemies would follow suit, which, of course, they didn’t.

Obama chose Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense because he supported zero-nuclear foolishness. Hagel was on the Board of Directors of the Ploughshares Fund, which gave millions of dollars to spread zero-nuke nonsense and lift sanctions on Iran.

Obama used his State of the Union speech this year to breathe new life into his effort to reduce nuclear weapons around the world. He wants to cut our nuclear forces by about a third, but Communist North Korea is not responsive to these overtures.

North Korea’s new boss, Kim Jong Un, is the 30-year-old grandson of the Communist tyrant who started the Korean War in 1950. Kim has now put our 28,000 U.S. troops on the peninsula at risk by declaring that the 1953 Armistice suspending the Korean War is null and void, so North and South Korea are in a “state of war.”

U.S. defense experts believe that North Korean missiles can reach Hawaii and Alaska, but not yet the continental United States. North Korea has conducted a long-range missile test, a nuclear test and demonstrated a mobile launcher, all of which indicate that North Korea’s technology is advancing faster than the U.S. had predicted.

Obama has now reversed his April 2009 decision to close our missile field in Alaska. The Pentagon says it will spend $1 billion to expand our West Coast missile-defense system by installing 14 additional ground-based missile interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska (as originally planned by the Bush administration). The Pentagon says it is also looking for a third U.S. site to protect our East Coast.

Sending U.S. B-2 stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to drop dummy munitions on a South Korean island during a military drill with South Korea was another signal that Obama may have pivoted. That was clearly a message to Kim to be careful how he proceeds with his military provocations.

The B-2 bombers cost $135,000 per hour to fly, so two round trips to South Korea cost about $5.4 million. Since this show of force was primarily to defend South Korea, we should take Donald Trump’s suggestion and send the bill to South Korea, which they can pay with the money they are making out of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement.

We were promised that the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, supported by Obama and passed by Congress in October 2011, would create U.S. jobs by promoting U.S. exports to South Korea. That pie-in-the-sky promise was always a lie; the Agreement promoted only imports, particularly cheap Korean cars coming into the U.S. without paying any U.S. tariff or tax.

But that is not the worst of the free-trade trick played on Americans. South Korean products are especially cheap because South Korea hires 44,000 North Korean workers, paid 25 cents an hour, at the Kaesong Industrial Complex located just north of the North-South boundary.

The workers’ wages at this sweatshop are paid directly to the North Korean government, which skims off up to 45 percent. North Korea’s Kaesong profits are estimated to provide 36 percent of North Korea’s national income, so the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement has forced Americans to finance North Korea’s nuclear program to threaten us.

Support for the Republican Party is down, but the number of people who call themselves conservative is holding steady. They face the same old choice-not-an-echo battle: grass-roots conservative Republicans vs. the liberal, globalist Establishment RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

The Priebus manifesto was written by party insiders who are very Establishment (i.e., associates of one of the two Bushes, and no local party conservatives or tea-party types), so we can’t expect the authors to take blame for their disastrous election loss in 2012. After all, they predicted their victory right up to and including Election Day.

The autopsy included a lot of chatter about “growth” and “opportunity,” plus 30 mentions of the need to be more “inclusive,” but that warm and fuzzy invitational language didn’t extend to those who want to do something so daring as to nominate conservative candidates who aren’t afraid to talk about the right to life and traditional marriage.

The autopsy pompously declared, “You have to have candidates who don’t make tragic mistakes.” But the worst mistakes were made by the Establishment’s own candidate, Mitt Romney, who failed to use so many issues that connect with the American people. The dozen losses of Establishment-selected candidates for president and Senate show that the people writing the autopsy have a worse record of picking candidates than the grass roots, who picked winners such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Mike Lee.

It’s too bad Pat Caddell wasn’t on the autopsy drafting committee. Of course, that wouldn’t have been appropriate because he is a Democrat, but he could have given the committee a big dose of reality.

Caddell saved his comments for a brutal speech to those who attended the annual conservative conference called CPAC. He said, “The Republican Party is in the grips of what I call the CLEC – the Consultant, Lobbyist, and Establishment Complex,” which he defined as a “self-serving interconnected network of individuals interested in preserving their own power far more than in winning elections.”

“Just follow the money,” Caddell reminded us, commenting on the hundreds of millions of dollars this group spent while losing most of their so-called “moderate” candidates. Despite losing with their candidates, wasting so much donors’ money, and being so well-paid for zero results, the same Establishment strategists have the impudence to tell us we should hire them to reform the Republican Party.

The autopsy stated solemnly that a “healthy debate of ideas is fundamentally good for the Republican Party.” Agreed. But the Establishment is always determined to suppress all debate or discussion of social, moral, or national security ideas by Republican candidates.

The autopsy even gave the back of its hand to Republican hero Ronald Reagan, implying that he is now ancient history. But Reagan gave us a model of defeating the Establishment candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1980, and then going on to win two spectacular national elections, and roughly half of today’s electorate was old enough to vote for Reagan in 1984.

The most insufferable part of the autopsy is the way these losing Republican strategists presume to tell us that the way to attract new voters is to embrace comprehensive immigration of Hispanics. All available evidence shows that endorsing any form of amnesty, or legislating any part of it, will produce votes for Democrats, not Republicans.

The autopsy recommends a bunch of changes in party rules, all of which would make it harder for grass-roots candidate to compete against moneyed Establishment candidates. The autopsy fails to recognize early voting as a major factor that produced Democratic votes and presents no plan to encourage state legislatures to eliminate or reduce it, even though Republicans control half the state legislatures.

The autopsy wants the Establishment to “become much more intentional about candidate recruitment,” especially by working with state parties to identify candidates for local office, such as mayor, county commission and city council. The national party has a lot to do without butting into local elections.

The autopsy fails to encourage a commitment to traditional Republican principles, such as marriage and military superiority, which are all clearly enunciated in the national Republican Platform adopted in Tampa last year. Some have forgotten that Ronald Reagan advised us to run on a platform of “bold colors with no pastel shades.”

Amnesty advocates shrink from using the word amnesty and try hard to shroud their message in deceptive words. So let’s understand their vocabulary: reform, comprehensive, earned legal status and path to citizenship are all code words for amnesty.

At the recent conservative jamboree called CPAC, several panels and even star banquet speaker former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tried hard to soften or disguise the fact that their proposals are really amnesty. But conservatives agree with Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, that the essence of amnesty is to “reward them with the objective of their crime” and agree with Ann Coulter who told CPAC that amnesty is “suicidal” for Republicans.

Promises by the amnesty advocates to secure the border after the illegals are granted residency, or even simultaneously, are unacceptable and unbelievable. In the famous words of Yogi Berra, an oral agreement is not worth the paper it is written on.

The American people want the U.S. government to obey and enforce existing laws. That starts with building a fence on our southern border, which was required by a 2006 federal law signed by President George W. Bush in a well-publicized photo op. Instead of building the fence Congress ordered, the government spent nearly $2 billion building what was called a virtual fence. It didn’t work and now is being dismantled at additional expense.

Here are the requirements that must be met before we start talking:

First, we want and expect a border fence to be built like the efficient, successful fence that protects the border near San Diego. That means a 12-foot-high double fence with a road in between.

Second, we want enforcement of the entry-exit system, whereby people admitted on visas are tracked to make sure they leave the U.S. when their temporary visit expires. That’s another federal law that has never been enforced.

Third, we want a law that requires employers to use E-Verify for new and current employees. This is as simple as having retailers check your credit card when you make a purchase; just put your credit card or your Social Security number in a machine and you get an immediate answer as to whether it’s valid.

Americans must provide their Social Security number when they apply for a job, and immigrants should not be exempt from laws the rest of us must obey. This simple procedure would identify the illegals and thereby make many jobs available to unemployed Americans.

Fourth, eliminate all schemes for the admittance of guest workers, both the uneducated who take entry-level jobs away from our own high-school dropouts and the H-1B and other special-purpose visas (a system rife with fraud) who take jobs away from our own college graduates because the big companies prefer to hire lower-paid foreigners.

Fifth, enforce cooperation between federal and state immigration authorities, so when a state picks up an illegal he can be immediately turned over to the feds. This cooperation should also eliminate the so-called sanctuary cities, where federal immigration law is ignored.

Sixth, reinstate the rule that was in effect for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came through Ellis Island. If they had a major disease or failed to provide proof that they would NOT become a public charge, they were sent back to their home country.

Seventh, develop a constructive plan to assimilate the legal immigrants who have come to our country over the last 25 years. This includes using the major way earlier immigrants were assimilated: having their children in public schools taught only in English and abolishing the unpopular, expensive hiring of teachers of dozens of foreign languages to supervise immigrant kids speaking their native language year after year, never learning English.

Eighth, stop lying to Republicans, falsely telling them that amnesty is the key to increasing their Hispanic vote. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support that notion, and there’s plenty of evidence that amnesty delivers votes to Obama Democrats because, as reported by the Washington Post-Kaiser survey, 67 percent of Hispanics favor a “larger federal government with many services.”

Ninth, stop peddling the false notion that amnesty is the “Christian” thing to do. Amnesty will betray Hispanics because it will open our borders to a flood of new illegals, increase the millions below the poverty line and make it impossible for legal or assimilated immigrants to achieve the American dream.

We got a shock recently when the national news carried information about an illegal alien from Nepal carrying this ancient disease across our southern border illegally after traveling through 13 countries. He probably infected people all along the way.

This Nepalese man is now in an Immigration and Customs detention facility in Texas in so-called medical isolation. We don’t know how many of our U.S. Border Patrol and medical personnel may have been infected before his life-threatening disease was diagnosed.

A full-page account of the TB problem in the Wall Street Journal described in detail the worry of our health officials that our 2,000-mile southern border could become a breeding ground for fatal, drug-resistant TB.

These diseased illegal aliens who show up on our doorstep in Texas and Arizona, requiring years of medication and isolation while being a danger to the lives of Americans assigned to care for them, are very costly. A recent CDC study estimates the cost of treatment on average to be $140,000, and some cases run as high as $700,000.

Tuberculosis is a debilitating disease that has shortened human lives since ancient times. It is caused by infectious bacteria that easily pass airborne from person to person through casual association, coughing and breathing.

Since 1950, TB has been fully treatable with drugs that cost pennies to make. The problem is the people who quit taking their medicine as soon as they feel better, before the infection has been completely eliminated from the body. The vast majority of cases of MDR TB in the United States are with people born in other countries who have come to the U.S.

Irresponsible behavior by people all over the world, especially in developing countries such as India and Mexico, has led to an explosion of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) versions of TB. Such cases are rampant in countries that supply cheap labor (both legal and illegal) to the United States.

During the heyday of immigration through Ellis Island, prospective immigrants were medically screened and sent back to their home country if there was evidence of TB. Today, instead of screening undesirable people at the border, we are asked to pay our health workers to treat them.

However, it’s not enough to supply and dispense the anti-TB drugs. We have to watch them take their drug every day.

In the face of this costly disease invading us across our southern border, not only from but through Mexico, a couple of busybodies have been given space in the Wall Street Journal to broach a plan to dig up an unused clause of NAFTA to allow Mexicans without limit to work legally anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. The purpose is to make the U.S. border as open to workers as it has been for goods and investment.

That’s a terrible idea on many counts. Opening our southern border for any or all Mexicans to work in the U.S. would not only mean an open door to disease, but also be a plan to make jobs go to foreigners instead of to the Americans and legal immigrants who are now swelling our unemployment rolls.

This off-the-wall proposal is a direct attack on American sovereignty. Americans should cry “shame” to all those who say that “the market” (rather than U.S. legislation) should decide who enters the United States. The decision as to who enters our country is part of the indicia of sovereignty, and if we were to give it away, we would no longer be a sovereign republic.

One of the arguments made for NAFTA when it was rammed through Congress by Bill Clinton in 1993 was that it would reduce illegal immigration from Mexico by providing more jobs for Mexicans in their own country. That argument, made by many prominent people, was false then and is ridiculous now.

Our government should obey the law, and that includes the law that requires building a fence on our southern border. The fence law was signed by President George W. Bush, who staged a photo op of his signing to emphasize its importance.

The fence was never built. The government spent nearly $2 billion experimenting with a stupid “virtual” fence, which didn’t work and has been abandoned. We expect a fence like the one that works so well in San Diego: a 12-foot high double fence.