A little over a week ago, the law firm of Wildes & Weinberg announced that it had successfully helped Venezuelan Miss Universe 2009, Stefania Fernandez, obtain a greed card. Meanwhile, it appears the Mexican Miss Universe 2010, Jimena Navarrete, was seen “chatting away cozily with immigration attorney Michael Wildes. “Fernandez joins Dayana Mendoza, Miss Universe 2008, on an elite list of celebrities and tastemakers that have relied on Wildes & Weinberg, P.C. for its expert counsel,” boasts the website of Wildes & Weinber. “Stefania Fernandez, Miss Universe 2009, has been approved for a green card based on her extraordinary ability and global philanthropic efforts.”

It’s great that Fernandez will be bringing her talents, beauty, and philanthropic work to the U.S., however, what’s unfortunate is that many of her fellow Latin Americans have been waiting for decades just to get their foot in the door.

The law gives preference to categories of immigrants who are related to U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, and immigrants who have already secured employment. With the exception of beauty queens, entertainers, and those few who possess “extraordinary abilities,” most immigrants who don’t have a job offer or family in the U.S. get the door shut in their faces. The utter lack of legal channels explains why so many migrants enter the U.S. illegally.

Even migrants who fit into family- or employment-based visas don’t have it easy. As of September 2009 there are over 4.5 million applicants who have been waiting for a U.S. green card for several years. More specifically, 4.2 million foreigners have been waiting to be reunited with their families in the U.S. and 360,000 applicants for employment-based green cards. Employment-based visa wait times start at about five years for most applicants. The Asian Pacific American Legal Center notes that for family members seeking U.S. residence, the wait can be anywhere from five to 22 years:

(Family sponsored waiting list registrants represent just over 67% of the total. Employment-based waiting list registrants represent 75% of the total).

That’s not to suggest Miss Universe should have to wait 22 years to obtain a green card herself. If anything, the immigration system should be reformed to allow for a more flexible and expedited visa system. The U.S. certainly shouldn’t automatically grant a visa to anyone who applies, but current visa quotas are static and outdated. Whether the economy demands more or less workers, the backlogs persist. In the meantime, talented workers get frustrated and look elsewhere for opportunities, families are kept apart, and more people resort to entering the U.S. without proper documentation.

Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) — who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that is due to take up a vote on the New START treaty in mid-September — wrote an op-ed over the weekend defending himself against charges that he is holding the New START treaty hostage in exchange for nuclear pork. Corker’s response was that he was holding the New START treaty hostage because we really need nuclear pork — particularly in Tennessee, which really needs a new nuclear facility. He wrote:

Before a treaty can be ratified, we must ensure there are appropriate commitments to fully invest in the rehabilitation of the warheads and their components… Tennessee is playing a critical role in this process. Planning is already underway for the construction of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at Y-12 … It is my sincere hope to be able to support this treaty. To get there, we need to invest in modernization of the remaining arsenal … If these objectives are met, in conjunction with the prescribed reductions under this treaty, we will be more secure as a country.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that the Obama administration agrees with Corker! They have pledged to build this new facility in Tennessee and have therefore committed to a massive $80 billion increase in the nuclear weapons infrastructure – such that even though the US will be reducing its nuclear arsenal the US will be spending significantly more to maintain it.

Corker seems to be insisting that the Obama administration’s cost estimates for the new facility are too low. But there currently are no cost estimates for the facility. There is a cost range from $1.4 to $3.5 billion. The actual cost needed to build the facility won’t be known until the design phase for the facility is complete. But Corker, perhaps due to some new found knowledge of the architecture of nuclear weapons buildings, is demanding between $4-5 billion be spent on the facility. In other words, Corker is making a demand for a check that the Obama administration simply can’t write. Since they can’t commit to allocating 12 to 350 percent more on a facility that isn’t even designed. They can only commit to building the facility, which they have.

The question here is at what point will Corker decide that the Obama administration’s commitments to the facility are for real. One would hope he just doesn’t realize that there is little the Administration can due to meet his demands – as David Broder noted, Republicans have shown their ignorance on START already. But perhaps Corker knows that the Administration can’t make any more tangible commitments and is therefore just playing a double game.

Either way he is playing a very dangerous game. If START is not ratified, as Generals John Castellaw, Dirk Jameson, and John Adams explained in an oped this weekend, the US would be “left blind” due to the loss of intelligence and monitoring of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Only Corker knows what game he is playing, but it is clear that it is a very dangerous one.

On Saturday, President Obama formally announced the end of the combat mission in Iraq. “On Tuesday, after more than seven years, the United States of America will end its combat mission in Iraq and take an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war,” Obama said. “But the bottom line is this,” he added, “The war is ending. … And by the end of next year, all of our troops will be home.”

In 2008, President Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqis to pull out all U.S. troops by 2012. Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Iraq war cheerleader Bill Kristol said that he wants Obama to announce that the U.S. will stay after 2011, with a permanent occupation force:

CHRIS WALLACE: Where does Iraq stand?

KRISTOL: Well, a lot depends on what we do in Iraq, as it depended on what we did in 1953 in Korea. Eisenhower said, “I’ll get — we’ll get out of Korea. We’ll end the war.” He did. Republicans were bitterly critical of Truman’s conduct in the war in Korea.

He didn’t then pull all our troops out and wash his hands of it and say, “Well, this is up to the Koreans to resolve their future.” He left enough troops there. … If you talk privately to Bush people and to Obama people, they said that could be renegotiated. If the Iraqi government wants to renegotiate that over the next year once they get their government set up in the next month, the President, I think, should signal that he would be open to that.

Kristol then went back to his old refrain. “We won the war,” he said. But just seconds later, he attacked Obama for allegedly saying the same thing. “And this rhetoric of ‘the war is over, it’s now up to the Iraqis’ is a mistake. … It’s irresponsible,” Kristol said. Watch it:

While Obama never said “the war is over,” he did say this weekend that “all” U.S. troops will withdraw from Iraq by 2012. And Gen. Ray Odierno — the commanding general in Iraq — did suggest that a small U.S. military presence “could” be possible, but nothing that amounts to what Kristol wants. “If the government of Iraq requests some technical assistance in fielding systems that allow them to continue to protect themselves, some external threats, we could be here,” he said.

But as Kristol once said before, only “sober, serious” people want tens of thousands of U.S. troops to stay in Iraq, even if it means putting more and more strain on the military, servicemembers and their families, and on the mission in Afghanistan. So even though “we won the war,” as Kristol says, the U.S. needs a large troop presence there indefinitely.

For months, conservatives have led a hateful campaign against the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center that is going to be built two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York City. High-ranking Republicans have spearheaded this campaign, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even going as far as to claim that Park 51 will act as a launching pad for the introduction of “Sharia law” to America.

Now, Newsweek reveals the most concrete evidence yet that this campaign is serving to bolster support for Islamic radicalism abroad. In an interview with the magazine, a Taliban operative going by the name Zabihullah said that, by “preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor.” He goes on to explain that the anti-mosque campaign is providing the Taliban with “with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” Another Taliban official expects that the anti-mosque campaign will provoke a “new wave of terrorist trainees from the West,” similar to suspected Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad. Zabihullah concludes, the “more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get”:

Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” [...]

Taliban officials say they’re looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year’s Times Square car bomber. “I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage,” says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get,” Zabihullah predicts.

As ThinkProgress previously noted, researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill concluded in a study earlier this year that contemporary mosques in the United States serve as a deterrent to Islamic radicalism. It now appears that the relationship works both ways. As the majority of tolerant and progressive Muslim Americans — like those heading Park 51 and other mosques — are prevented from peacefully practicing their own faith, the more likely it is that Muslims across the world will be radicalized and turned violent.