This is beyond funny:

The Canadian political operative hired by the California Republican Party on a coveted H1B visa to do campaign consulting has been fired after it was revealed he was apparently working in violation of immigration law.

The dismissal, announced this week, came after The Chronicle reported last month that Christopher Matthews apparently violated federal immigration law when he also earned money from a second employer.

So was he using the GOP to get into the country to really work for somebody else? Nope, he was double-dipping with the San Diego GOP to apparently break the law. Talk about heads exploding…

Sources said that some officials in the state GOP discussed hiring an immigration attorney to defend Matthews after the news stories revealed the apparent violation.

But that idea was scrapped after other party leaders argued that spending money to defend Matthews could subject state GOP officials – who have often been outspoken in their criticism of illegal immigration – to charges of hypocrisy.

“Would they have done that if his name was Mario Lopez?” asked one GOP official who was in on the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Of course, this story has to remind readers of the context:

This was the second time in recent months the state GOP has faced questions about hiring foreign workers who have been targeted by immigration officials.

Matthews was hired for his job by Michael Kamburowski, an Australian citizen who in 2007 was named the state GOP’s chief operations officer. Kamburowski resigned the $130,000-a-year post after The Chronicle reported last year that he had sued federal officials who jailed him in 2004 for alleged visa violations and attempted to deport him.

The Chronicle reported this week that federal court records also show that Kamburowski had no valid visa or work permit – and no legal right to stay in the United States – during the five years he worked as a high-profile lobbyist for conservative icon Grover Norquist, a longtime adviser to President Bush and other GOP leaders.

Californian’s Republican Party!

The Chron gives a follow-up to last week’s hilarious story that the California Republican Party has been hiring non-citizens to staff their top jobs, even as they decry the menace of immigration.  In fact, it turns out that one of their hires may not even be in the country legally.

Michael Kamburowski, the Australian immigrant hired as a top official in the California Republican Party, was ordered deported in 2001, jailed three years later for visa violations — and has filed a $5 million wrongful arrest lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to U.S. District Court documents.

Kamburowski was named in March to be the chief operating officer of the California GOP. He is responsible for the state party’s multimillion-dollar budget and oversees campaign funds and financing for the nation’s largest state GOP organization.

This is hypocrisy on steroids.  You have a party that never misses an opportunity to rail against illegal immigration, hiring an illegal immigrant, essentially, as their COO.  Kamburowski says he’s a legal resident now, and that he’s suing DHS for unlawfully jailing him and attempting to deport him.

But the funniest part is, for a lot of this time, Kamburowski was selling real estate in the Dominican Republic:

But Kamburowski’s former boss in the Dominican Republic resort town of Punta Cana — where Kamburowski worked until February — expressed astonishment that the Australian was hired for such an important financial job in a major political party.

“I wouldn’t give him my company to run, I can tell you that,” said Rico Pester, the owner of Re/Max Island Realty in the fashionable Caribbean beach region.

Pester said Kamburowski arrived in Punta Cana in the summer of 2006 and “was so successful that he couldn’t sell anything the whole time he was here — and we provided him with clients. He didn’t rent anything and he didn’t sell anything. … I have no idea what he was doing.”

Then, in February, Kamburowski “ran away without mentioning anything to us,” he said.

“I couldn’t understand how somebody like him could become a (Republican Party) COO,” Pester said in a telephone interview.

Look, if you’re bad at selling prime vacation property in the D.R., maybe you’d be good at selling a brand as damaged as the Republican Party in California!

Of course, someone like Kamburowski doesn’t have to worry about money.  He’s a classic wingnut welfare recipient who cut his teeth with a Grover Norquist-affiliated group.  He overstayed his visa after coming to this country, did the game of marrying an American woman to get a green card, then divorced her but remained in the country.  The INS tried to deport him but Kamburowski claimed he never got their messages because he moved to DC.  There’s more in the article.

This is someone who’s seemingly never had to answer for any of his actions, and somehow keeps falling upward.  What a perfect symbol for the state GOP.