Actual AP headline: “Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Ariz. law”

That’s tonight’s headline. Tomorrow’s headline, inevitably? “Border states scramble to emulate Arizona’s new law.”

Fortunately for these poor victims of conservo-Nazi persecution, there’s a scrupulously tolerant safe haven nearby. And I hear the mayor’s fantastic.

“Nobody wants to pick us up,” Julio Loyola Diaz says in Spanish as he and dozens of other men wait under the shade of palo verde trees and lean against a low brick wall outside the east Phoenix home improvement store.

Many day laborers like Diaz say they will leave Arizona because of the law, which also makes it a crime to be in the U.S. illegally and directs police to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants…

An estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants have left Arizona in the past two years as it cracked down on illegal immigration and its economy was especially hard hit by the Great Recession. A Department of Homeland Security report on illegal immigrants estimates Arizona’s illegal immigrant population peaked in 2008 at 560,000, and a year later dipped to 460,000.

The law’s supporters hope the departure of illegal immigrants will help dismantle part of the underground economy here and create jobs for thousands of legal residents in a state with a 9.6 percent unemployment rate.

Elsewhere tonight, Obama finally acknowledged that Congress might not have an appetite for immigration reform this year after tackling one controversial issue already, by which of course he meant the unpopular, pitiful clusterfark known as ObamaCare. Quoth the AP, “[H]e says there needs to be a lot of work done on immigration and he wants to come up with solutions that can get broad support from the American people.” Am I mistaken or don’t we already have “broad support” for the idea that there needs to be much more done to enforce the border? In fact, if memory serves, the notion that federal inaction forced Arizona to act is now an official White House talking point. Consider this, then, yet another reminder of how phony The One’s pragmatism is. He could champion a widely popular border-enforcement bill with a promise to revisit the subject later to pursue amnesty, but that would cause political problems for him among Latinos. So instead he’ll go on complaining about how problematic Arizona’s law is while blaming Congress for doing nothing.

Now that I’ve blown your mind with the AP headline, I’m going to blow it again. Brace yourselves, my friends … for Chris Matthews — unlikely voice of reason.

• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week
• MSNBC consensus: Obama’s speech was historic, amazing, “one of the best of his presidency”

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