Multi Medium

Obama Denounced By Expert On Intolerance

Oh, this is just beautiful.  The opening paragraphs of a Guardian hit piece on how Rev. Wright has thoroughly destroyed Barack Obama’s political career:

Listen for a few minutes to Joey Vento, owner of a south Philadelphia institution that serves gut-busting sandwiches through a takeaway hatch, and the scale of Barack Obama’s problems become apparent. Obama is having the worst week of his campaign. It is, some believe, a week that threatens his chances of becoming president.

“That minister, that was terrible, all his sayings. He’s preaching hatred,” Vento said. “The thing I didn’t like about Obama; you’re telling me for 20 years you been going to that church and you never heard that?”

Vento, 68, was speaking about Obama’s former pastor and spiritual adviser, Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons have been aired repeatedly on US television denouncing the US as racist.

Joey Vento, Joey Vento… cheesesteaks… Now why does that sound so familiar? Oh wait, now I remember:

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations held a public hearing Friday to address a controversial sign at the popular Geno’s Steaks that has garnered worldwide attention.

The hearing was scheduled after allegations were made accusing Geno’s Steaks of discrimination for posting a sign that reads: “This Is America. When Ordering Speak English.”

Geno’s owner Joey Vento said it is “free speech” and defended his policy during Friday’s hearing.

“This country is a melting pot, but what makes it work is the English language,” Vento told the commission during a hearing that lasted more than six hours….

Oh yeah, he’s the perfect guy to interview about hate speech.

1 comment March 22nd, 2008 at 08:51pm Posted by Eli

Monster Of The Week

This is absolutely terrible:

No problems so far, the immigration agent told the American citizen and his 22-year-old Colombian wife at her green card interview in December. After he stapled one of their wedding photos to her application for legal permanent residency, he had just one more question: What was her cellphone number?

The calls from the agent started three days later. He hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a private meeting. And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not realizing that she was recording everything on the digital camera in her purse.

“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”

She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.

The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to The New York Times and then to the Queens district attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger of making a complaint, even in the rare case when abuse of power may have been caught on tape.

The story goes on to provide all the sordid details, as well as a bunch of other examples of predatory immigration officials extorting sex from desperate, helpless immigrant women. In this particular case, the woman’s husband found out and left her, and she still doesn’t have a green card.

Someone really needs to go through La Migra with a firehose and clean all the scum out, and I don’t think it’ll be Dubya or McCain. How about it, Barack? Hillary?

Add comment March 21st, 2008 at 07:18am Posted by Eli

Grover Makes A Boo-Boo

Oopsie:

A former California Republican Party official who resigned last year in a controversy over his immigration status had no valid visa or work permit during his high-profile career as a Washington lobbyist for conservative icon Grover Norquist, newly filed court records show.

Michael Kamburowski, an Australian citizen who served briefly as chief operating officer of the state GOP, worked from 1995 to 2000 as a vice president of Americans for Tax Reform in Washington, D.C., an organization headed by Norquist - an architect of modern conservatism who has advised President Bush and top GOP political leaders.

For Norquist, Kamburowski lobbied Congress on dozens of issues, including immigration reform, according to his resume. He also directed the Norquist organization’s Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, an effort to rename public buildings to honor the former president.

But when he went to work for Norquist, Kamburowski had no legal right to live or work in the U.S., according to documents filed recently in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., in connection with a wrongful-arrest lawsuit he filed against U.S. immigration officials.

Not to worry, though - I don’t think Republicans mind illegal immigrants nearly so much when they’re white guys.

(h/t kirk murphy)

Add comment February 21st, 2008 at 07:16am Posted by Eli

A Modest Proposal On How To Achieve Immigration Reform

It’s very simple, really. Latinos need to start telling pollsters that they love Republicans and intend to vote Republican, and in fact actually do so in states and districts that are not up for grabs (maybe not quite so much in blue states - best not to take chances)… In other words, make it appear that Latinos are now a core of reliably Republican voters.

Once that idea has been established, I guarantee that the GOP will swallow its inherent hatred of brown people, and move heaven and earth to fast-track the citizenship process to bring in all those new Republican voters. At which point Latinos can go back to voting against them and openly hating their guts. Hot damn, that would be a beautiful thing.

(Note: This strategy could potentially be used to stop the disenfranchisement of black voters as well.)

Add comment December 20th, 2007 at 11:22am Posted by Eli

Why The Wingnuts Scare Me

I saw a couple of items in the past couple of days that, shall we say, gave me pause. The first one was about Romney ramping up attack ads against Huckabee (and what an ugly sectarian grudge match that’s shaping up to be), but no mention of Wayne Dumond. I kinda thought that the Republican presidential candidates would be falling all over themselves to “Willie Horton” Huckabee, especially now that he’s looking like more and more of a threat, but it just hasn’t happened.

Which makes me wonder: Is it because Huckabee wrangling the parole of a serial rapist over the objections of his victims and their families just isn’t that big a deal to the supposedly law-and-order Republican base? Is it because Dumond is white and therefore not Scary Boogeyman material? Is it because Dumond raped a Clinton relative, meaning that he was only in prison as part of the Vast Insidious Clinton Conspiracy? Or even if he really was guilty and even if he did rape and kill at least one woman and probably another, it was still a good thing because it was a poke in the Clenis’s eye?

Admittedly, I’m speculating. But after the smears and dirty tricks Dubya’s primary campaign used against McCain in 2000, and Huckabee’s question about whether Mormons think Satan is Jesus’ brother, it’s hard for me to believe that Republicans have any sense of restraint when it comes to primary contests. Which is why I think Romney has calculated that Republican voters wouldn’t consider Huckabee’s role in Dumond’s parole to be a bad thing.

The second item is about the wingnut reaction to the Crazy Minuteman Guy’s endorsement of Huckabee:

Malkin is gob-smacked. Larison is slack-jawed:

I can’t express to you all how little sense this makes. It’s baffling, like so much else associated with Mike Huckabee lately. The only thing more bizarre would have been if Gilchrist had endorsed McCain. How does the founder of the Minutemen endorse Huckabee? What parallel universe have we fallen into that this is happening? I mean, Gilchrist essentially has to ignore everything that the man said or did regarding immigration for the last decade. Apparently the take-away lesson is that shameless pandering works. Before much longer maybe Huckabee will land Tancredo’s endorsement.

So think about that for a moment. Huckabee picks up an endorsement from a right-wing racist nutcase, and the wingnutosphere reaction is not, “OMG, what is Huckabee thinking, getting an endorsement from such a repulsive kook?”, but rather, “OMG, what is Gilchrist thinking? Huckabee is totally unworthy of his valuable endorsement!”

To riff on Bill O’Reilly’s idea, it’s as if Rudy got an endorsement from the ghost of Jeffrey Dahmer, and the wingnuts went ballistic that Dahmer would endorse someone who kills and eats people so infrequently.

So yeah, I think their values system might be just a teensy bit messed up.

(h/t Julia and Blue Texan)

Add comment December 12th, 2007 at 11:47pm Posted by Eli

Chock Full O’ Nuts

Jesus’s General appears to have been sucked into Major James Linzey’s lonely war against reality and sanity:

I’m having a very strange email conversation with Major James Linzey and someone named Oliver White, both of whom are copying their emails to a John Flammer at a US Army email address. Apparently, they believe my posts about a radio appearance in which Major Linzey discussed the threat Mexicans, Communists, Chinese, Democrats, and Satan, Prince of Darkness pose to the United States were inaccurate, but are unable or unwilling to point out the alleged inaccuracies.

[strange e-mail conversation]

Dear Major Linzey,

It’s occurred to me that perhaps you did not have the software needed to hear the clips from your appearance on The Edge radio show I posted on my blog, and that’s why you haven’t been able to tell me why you think my characterization of those clips was inaccurate. If that’s the case, then I think it might be helpful to provide you with a transcript of your remarks. Hopefully, after reading it, you’ll realize that you were mistaken. If not, and you still believe that my posts are inaccurate, please point out those inaccuracies in writing so I may address them.

Here are the transcripts.

Regarding the Minutemen:

I would like 5000 American patriots to go down on April 1st, down to Tombstone, Arizona, be part of the Minuteman Project We need to let the enemies know that we’re there and we’re watching.

Regarding Chinese training the Mexican Army to invade the US:

There are five to ten thousand Chinese military soldiers in Mexico now training Mexican soldiers for invasion in the United States.

Regarding Chinese soldiers smuggling dirty bombs into the US:

Now I’ve I’ve got friends who work for the CIA and the F FBI and I know things from the inside. Now, the CIA several months ago, arrested four Chinese military soldiers who came across the Mexico-Texan border with a dirty bomb and the CIA has them in custody.

Regarding Satan, Commies, and Democrats:

We’re not going to let Satan take what Jesus gave us, a beacon of light to the world, a beacon of, a beacon of,light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now when they come over here, and these Communist want to take over America, that light goes out. And I do believe that the Democratic Party and the Communist Party of America are one in the same.

(…)

You can hear the full interview here at The Edge’s web site where you’ll also find this promo for your appearance (I have a screen cap if you need it):

Major James F. Linzey; U.S. Army Officer, Chaplain, and director of Operation Freedom, exposes how the satanic forces in the U.S. Government allow illegal immigration, giving access to terrorists to invade America’s heartland. Find out the myths and lies, and how illegal immigration effects the politics, domestic issues, national security, and terrorist ring in the United States, and you can do about it. Get your questions in early. It’s going to be hot!

He will expose unknown satanic forces and how they are using illegal immigration to:

* Affect American politics
* Sway Domestic issues
* Destroy National Security
* Create a Terrorist Ring which could start an internal revolution.

Have you asked Mr. Ott to remove any of this?

Hopefully the transcripts will help to jog your memory. If not, I want to be clear that I’d be glad to correct any inaccuracies you point out to me in writing. That is if you truly are interested in the truth and aren’t being forced to recant your statements by Chi-Com trained Mexican Commandos led by Satan and a cadre of Democrats.

Alrighty then. There’s really not much I can add here - the crazy speaks for itself.

Add comment December 12th, 2007 at 11:18am Posted by Eli

Bashing CNN Just Never Gets Old…

Tim Rutten totally nails CNN in his LAT media column:

THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can’t afford to be sick with anything that won’t be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a “debate,” what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

(…)

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday’s debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN’s performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

(…)

…CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue — immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it’s probably because you’re included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We’ve got a pretty good fix concerning what’s on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center’s most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday’s debate.

HERE’S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue….

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters’ concerns? The answer is that CNN’s most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday’s debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. So, what’s good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans’ debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you’ve made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That’s corruption, and it’s why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour “debating” an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal — and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed.

I agree with Rutten for the most part, but he’s thinking too small. CNN isn’t trying to make immigration a huge election issue to help Lou Dobbs, it’s trying to make it a huge issue to help the Republicans. It’s pretty clear by now that immigration is this election’s gay marriage, where the Republicans demagogue and demonize and make it suddenly an all-important, life-or-death issue to bash Democrats over the head with.

Of course, the risk here, which CNN and the Republicans seem oblivious to, is that there are a lot more Hispanics than there are gays, so there will be a lot more furious anti-Republican votes this time around. Maybe the GOP is just really confident in their ability to suppress Latino votes.

Add comment December 1st, 2007 at 12:32pm Posted by Eli

The Republican Holy Grail

The Washington Times tries to link illegal immigrants and Islamic terrorists:

The nation’s largest intelligence training center changed security measures in May after being warned that Islamist terrorists with the aid of Mexican drug cartels were planning an attack on the facility.

Fort Huachuca changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high powered weapons to attack the post, according to multiple confidential law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Times.

You have got to be kidding me - this is just pure unadulterated Crazy.

I sure would love to know who those “sources” were… (Can someone check Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo’s phone records?)

2 comments November 25th, 2007 at 07:34pm Posted by Eli

Racism At ICE?

Well, it’s certainly nice to know that our top immigration official is as sensitive and well-attuned to racial concerns as she is qualified:

The Department of Homeland Security will investigate a Halloween costume party hosted by a top immigration official and attended by a man dressed in a striped prison outfit, dreadlocks and darkened skin make-up, a costume some say is offensive, the department’s secretary said.

Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and host of the fundraising party, was on a three-judge panel that originally praised the prisoner costume for “originality.”

Yeah, the idea of a black man in prison is real original. Bravo to Mr. Creative. As Paddy says, “‘Some say’ is offensive?”

Possibly even more disturbing is the flood of apologist trolls in the comments saying, “So he dressed up as a black guy, big deal. Lighten up, it’s Halloween!” Most of them pointedly ignore the fact that the guy dressed up as a prison inmate. Why not just go as a white convict? What’s the value added by licking the third rail of blackface?

And to get back to the main point, how can we expect an agency headed by someone who thinks blackface is clever to treat illegal (or legal) immigrants with any kind of respect or human decency? Oh, right, WE CAN’T.

Add comment November 6th, 2007 at 09:31pm Posted by Eli

Third Rail

Rahm Emanuel, Political Genius, wants the Democratic Party to get tough on immigrants:

“This issue has real implications for the country. It captures all the American people’s anger and frustration not only with immigration, but with the economy,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and an architect of the Democratic congressional victories of 2006. “It’s self-evident. This is a big problem.”

(…)

House Democrats are so concerned that they have resumed talks on a new legislative push, even though the collapse of an immigration deal in the Senate this spring has left virtually no chance that a final bill can be passed in this Congress.

But even in the early stages of this renewed effort, negotiations have only underscored the party’s problems. Some Democratic leaders want what they call a “mini bill,” emphasizing border control, penalties on firms that employ illegal immigrants and stronger efforts to deny illegal immigrants government benefits. But Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), the point man on the bill, said he will never accept a measure that does not include a pathway to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented workers in the country.

(…)

“For the American people, and therefore all of us, it’s emerged as the third rail of American politics,” Emanuel said. “And anyone who doesn’t realize that isn’t with the American people.”

It’s only a matter of time before someone decides to combine third rails and start drafting immigrants.

Seriously, this may be a new low in stupidity for the Democrats. Why would they want to piss away the advantage with Hispanic voters that the GOP just handed them? I mean, it’s not like Dubya and his Intimidating 24% Approval Rating is bullying them into it this time.

4 comments October 23rd, 2007 at 09:12pm Posted by Eli

Hatred

Three news items from the last couple of weeks that really drive home just how much Republicans and the Bush administration hate immigrants:

1) Indiscriminate raids and arrests of legal immigrants for… being Latino?

2) Injecting deportees with psychotropic drugs against their will, apparently to make them passive and docile.

3) Tricking immigrants into attempting to register to vote when they’re not eligible, thus permanently disqualifying them from American citizenship.

Just absolutely horrible and despicable. This is not about keeping or kicking people out who don’t have a legal right to be here, this is about abusing, dehumanizing, and sabotaging the hated Other, even when they’re not doing anything wrong. This is not about hatred of illegal immigrants, this is about hatred of all immigrants, all foreigners.

The gap between this country’s stated ideals and actual behavior is simply heartbreaking. We could be the greatest country on earth, but we seem hell-bent on becoming the worst.

3 comments October 15th, 2007 at 10:26pm Posted by Eli

They Took Our Jails!

Apparently it’s no longer enough to simply lock up illegal immigrants. Now they have to be locked up in Special Immigrant Jails:

A panel studying illegal immigration in Virginia wants to build a 1,000-bed state jail solely for people arrested for being in the United States illegally. The Illegal Immigration Task Force agreed to 11 recommendations Monday in an effort to tighten enforcement of immigration laws. The new jail was one of them.

According to a presentation given at the last task force meeting, some 10 percent of inmates in Virginia’s jails over the past year were suspected illegal immigrants.

Latino leaders have disputed those statistics.

Those damn illegals are trying to take away American criminals’ hard-earned jail cells! It’s all part of their Nefarious Secret Plan To Take Over America! At least Virginia is doing something about it - no more illegal immigrants living the high life in the luxurious conditions our own American convicts enjoy, nosireebob.

Perhaps there is hope after all.

(h/t Pachacutec)

2 comments September 26th, 2007 at 06:48pm Posted by Eli

Just A Spoonful Of Racism Helps The Medicine Go Down…

Krugman is full of sweetness and light today, as usual:

So now Mitt Romney is trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And thereby hangs a tale — the tale, in fact, of American politics past and future, and the ultimate reason Karl Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority was a foolish fantasy.

(…)

[S]ome Republicans are trying to make similar use of the recent murder of three college students in Newark, a crime in which two of the suspects are Hispanic illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo flew into Newark to accuse the city’s leaders of inviting the crime by failing to enforce immigration laws, while Newt Gingrich declared that the “war here at home” against illegal immigrants is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

And Mr. Romney, who pretends to be whatever he thinks the G.O.P. base wants him to be, is running a radio ad denouncing New York as a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants, an implicit attack on Mr. Giuliani.

Strangely, nobody seems to be trying to make a national political issue out of other horrifying crimes, like the Connecticut home invasion in which two paroled convicts, both white, are accused of killing a mother and her two daughters. Oh, and by the way: over all, Hispanic immigrants appear to commit relatively few crimes — in fact, their incarceration rate is actually lower than that of native-born non-Hispanic whites.

To appreciate what’s going on here you need to understand the difference between the goals of the modern Republican Party and the strategy it uses to win elections.

The people who run the G.O.P. are concerned, above all, with making America safe for the rich. Their ultimate goal, as Grover Norquist once put it, is to get America back to the way it was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over,” getting rid of “the income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

But right-wing economic ideology has never been a vote-winner. Instead, the party’s electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity.

Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

(…)

But Republicans have a problem: demographic changes are making their race-based electoral strategy decreasingly effective. Quite simply, America is becoming less white, mainly because of immigration. Hispanic and Asian voters were only 4 percent of the electorate in 1980, but they were 11 percent of voters in 2004 — and that number will keep rising for the foreseeable future.

Those numbers are the reason Karl Rove was so eager to reach out to Hispanic voters. But the whites the G.O.P. has counted on to vote their color, not their economic interests, are having none of it. From their point of view, it’s us versus them — and everyone who looks different is one of them.

So now we have the spectacle of Republicans competing over who can be most convincingly anti-Hispanic. I know, officially they’re not hostile to Hispanics in general, only to illegal immigrants, but that’s a distinction neither the G.O.P. base nor Hispanic voters takes seriously.

Today’s G.O.P., in short, is trapped by its history of cynicism. For decades it has exploited racial animosity to win over white voters — and now, when Republican politicians need to reach out to an increasingly diverse country, the base won’t let them.

Well, there’s a happy ending, at least. But how sad is it that racism (and sexism, and homophobia) are the sugarcoating to make the Republican agenda more appealing? I’m picturing something like this:

PROSPECTIVE REPUBLICAN VOTER: I don’t see how any of these tax cuts benefit me - I don’t make that kind of money. And it looks like you’re always taking my employer’s side instead of mine.

REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: We hate blacks, Mexicans, women, and gays.

PROSPECTIVE REPUBLICAN VOTER: Okay, I’m in.

(Also, you will be relieved to know that Rudy is not taking this threat lying down. He’s hired Scott Howell & Company to do his media - they’re the folks responsible for the racist “Harold, call me” ad in Tennessee.)

6 comments August 24th, 2007 at 07:58pm Posted by Eli

Be Careful What You Ask For

David Sirota’s general premise is good, but I think his specific recommendation could easily backfire:

One of the major reasons why Democrats have not yet been able to pass legislation slowing down or ending the Iraq War is because they remained within their archetype (aka. the role low-information voters perceive them as reflexively playing). The strongest bills they have proposed have all been straight-up “antiwar” bills - that is, they bring the troops home to end the war and that’s about it. True, that IS the antiwar movement’s goal (a goal I wholeheartedly support) - but the problem with it as the stand-alone legislative strategy is that it doesn’t allow Democrats to play outside their antiwar archetype on Republican turf, nor does it make the average Republican incumbent all that uncomfortable, because it doesn’t force Republicans to make a choice between loyalty to Bush and loyalty to their conservative base.

Right now, the antiwar movement’s strategy is a battle of attrition. Keep pushing standalone antiwar bills, and hope that public opposition to the war will force Republicans to peel off. It certainly may work - but to echo Robert Redford’s famous line in The Candidate, there is a better way - at least in terms of a legislative strategy that gets our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Think for a moment about which issue Republicans have been trying to one-up and out-conservative each other on…Got it in your head? Right - it’s illegal immigration. On that issue, the least offensive Republican proposal from a racist/xenophobic perspective has been the effort to beef up border security. A look at recent congressional votes shows that beefing up border security has the widest bipartisan support among all the immigration-related proposals being considered.

So here’s the concept (which, though I’m not 100 percent sure, I don’t think has been tried yet in Congress): How about when Congress reconvenes in September, Democrats bring a bill to the floor of the House and Senate mandating that, say, 25,000 National Guardsmen be taken out of combat in Iraq and be immediately redeployed to guard America’s porous domestic borders - both southern and northern?…

Think this through for a moment. All of a sudden, the illegal-immigration-obsessed Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican Party, which also happens to be the most reflexively pro-war wing of the GOP, would be forced to choose either the Iraq War or beefed up border security. All of a sudden, we would be having a debate about two very real, very pressing priorities, rather than theoreticals and hypotheticals, and we would be discussing exactly how the misuse of our National Guard as a wing of the regular Army harms our ability to deal with the domestic challenges the National Guard was originally established to deal with.

With the war so unpopular, far-right, law-and-order, “tough on immigration” conservatives would be hard-pressed to vote against this kind of bill, potentially providing a veto-proof majority in support of it. And if they didn’t vote for it, Democrats would have a flip-flop campaign ad all set for 2008. You can just hear the voiceover: “The Republicans who told us they support border security voted against Democrats’ bill to secure our borders.”

This is a great idea in theory, but it assumes that Bush and the Republicans are somewhat responsible and sane. Given their approach over the last four years, I think it’s entirely possible that they would say, “You know, those Democrats may actually have a point, but Iraq is just too important and the surge is working too well for us to pull anyone out of Iraq. Instead of redeploying Guardsmen from Iraq, we will simply make use of the Guard who are rotated stateside in between deployments to Iraq. Border patrol is much less stressful than serving in Iraq, so this should not affect their combat readiness at all.”

Can anyone give me a good reason why this would not happen?

Add comment August 10th, 2007 at 11:16am Posted by Eli

David Frum Gets It Completely Wrong

Yeah, I know, no-one could have foreseen that…

Maybe you’ve heard about the recent polls showing a huge Democratic advantage among young voters. The latest , conducted by Stanley Greenberg for the Democracy Project, shows (among other dismal tidings) a 19-point party identification lead for Democrats among voters younger than 30.

Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day. The range of the issue disagreements range from the most prominent issues of the day (Iraq, immigration) to burning social issues (gay marriage, abortion) to fundamental ideological disagreements over the size and scope of government.

Okay, this sounds pretty straightforward so far: Young people hate Republicans because their policies and ideology are appalling. Good for them. But the wily David Frum manages to draw a completely different conclusion.

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) - and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 - and especially since 2000 - the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP. If Republicans face an inhospitable future after 2008, we will hear much of the dreadful legacy of George W. Bush on social issues, the war, the environment, etc. But Greenberg’s own work makes clear that these issues matter relatively little.

(…)

No, the legacy that will damage his party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement. This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals). It is these voters who will sway elections in future. And thanks to this president’s immigration policies, there are going to be a lot more of them than there might otherwise have been.

Wow. Frum starts out with what is actually a very important observation, and then draws the exact wrong conclusion from it. The Republicans’ problem is not leniency on immigration “enforcement” (it’s unclear whether Frum refers to Republican leniency, or the country’s leniency as a whole, but it doesn’t really matter); quite the opposite. The Republicans’ naked hostility towards immigrants has completely cancelled out their appeal to conservative religous Latinos, and their overall support in the Hispanic community has cratered as a result.

If the Republican party embraced immigrants instead of talking about them as subhuman vermin, stayed away from foolish wars, race-baiting, sexism, homophobia, and pervasive corruption, they could be a majority party for decades to come. On the other hand, they would no longer be the Republican party…

(h/t Nitpicker)

2 comments August 1st, 2007 at 11:52am Posted by Eli

Southern Strategery

How’s that working out for you, Republicans?

The threat came in the weekend mail.

The recipient was Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, who has been a leading advocate of the proposed legislation for changing the immigration system. His offices in Washington and across Florida have received thousands of angry messages in recent weeks, but nothing as alarming as that letter he received at his home.

“I’ll turn it over to Capitol police, and we’ll go from there,” said Mr. Martinez, who declined to elaborate on the nature of the threat.

(…)

Republicans who support the immigration bill are facing unusually intense opposition from conservative groups fighting it. This is among the first times, several of them said, that they have felt the full brunt of an advocacy machine built around conservative talk radio and cable television programs that have long buttressed Republican efforts to defeat Democrats and their policies.

While the majority of the telephone calls and faxes, letters and e-mail messages have been civil, aides to several senators said, the correspondence has taken a menacing tone in several cases.

Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican who is undecided on the final immigration bill, said his office received a telephone call recently that “made a threat about knowing where I lived.” Mr. Burr passed it along to the authorities. “There were enough specifics to raise some alarm bells,” he said.

(…)

“There’s racism in this debate,” [Senator Lindsey] Graham said. “Nobody likes to talk about it, but a very small percentage of people involved in this debate really have racial and bigoted remarks. The tone that we create around these debates, whether it be rhetoric in a union hall or rhetoric on talk radio, it can take people who are on the fence and push them over emotionally.”

No-one could have predicted that a political strategy based on demonizing black and brown people would actually reinforce racism. Inconceivable.

Basically, the Southern Strategy is to immigration reform as The War On Terror was to the Dubai Ports World deal. It’s a conflict between the racist, xenophobic loonies that the GOP has cultivated for the past 40 years and the big-money interests who actually pay the bills.

2 comments June 28th, 2007 at 11:16am Posted by Eli

Wait… What?

From Simon Rosenberg’s reaction to the failure of the immigration bill:

Somehow I thought that given the coming judgement of history, Mr. Bush would rise, drag his reluctant Party to the table, and end his time here with a powerful and moral act - bringing these 12 million out of the shadows - that would make it much difficult for history to break against him.

A powerful and moral act? Dude, which president and Party are you talking about?

1 comment June 8th, 2007 at 11:54am Posted by Eli

Take That!

Compassionate Conservatism at work. Do something that benefits illegal immigrants, get raided:

NEW HAVEN — Federal agents arrested 29 illegal immigrants in a raid Wednesday, two days after the city approved a program to make municipal identification cards available to them, federal officials said.

Paula Grenier, a spokeswoman for the Boston office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed that 29 immigrants who had already been ordered by judges to leave the country were arrested in a routine fugitive operation in New Haven.

She said that those arrested were in ICE custody and would be sent back to their home countries.

Kica Matos, who oversees the New Haven department that assists immigrants, said most of the arrests were in the city’s Fair Haven section, home to many immigrants. Officials believe none of the immigrants have criminal records, she said.

Matos and Jessica Mayorga, a spokeswoman for New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, said they believe the raids are related to the Board of Aldermen’s 25-1 vote this week to create all-purpose municipal identification cards. The cards will allow illegal immigrants to open bank accounts and use other services that may be unavailable without driver’s licenses or state-issued identification cards.

“Just two days ago the Board of Aldermen approved this resolution, and today we have the federal government terrifying New Haven residents and taking people away,” Matos said.

Grenier said the raids had nothing to do with the city’s approval of the ID program.

“These are routine fugitive operations,” he said. “We have teams deployed all over the U.S.”

If this were any other government, I might be able to believe that this was just a coincidence, but the Bushies are the most mean-spirited and vindictive administration this country has had since Nixon. At the least.

Some additional background:

Supporters say the ID program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, will help keep the city’s estimated 15,000 illegal immigrants safe. If they can open bank accounts, they will not need to carry large amounts of cash, a practice that makes them easy targets for robbers.

God forbid. Now we’ll never get rid of them! All those potential illegal immigrants who were contemplating sneaking into this country but were deterred by the fear of getting mugged, they’ll just be flooding in now.

Add comment June 6th, 2007 at 07:04pm Posted by Eli

High Noonan

Peggy Noonan has the latest installment of the Immigration Will Tear The GOP Apart saga:

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker–”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

Oh noes! Whatever will America do without the mature, competent leadership of the Republican Party?

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

Impossible. The Bush White House isn’t even a stopped clock that’s right twice a day; it’s a broken clock that actively avoids the correct time.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don’t like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don’t like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

Um, which conservatives is Noonan talking about here? The vast and vocal majority seems pretty enthusiastic about all of that - overspending, big government, and endless war are the only way to defeat THE SCARY TERRORISTS OMG!!!1!

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.”

This may be the greatest sentence ever written. How’s it feel, kids? Kinda sucks, don’t it.

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

Yes, we could tell from all the leaders of the conservative movement bitterly criticizing Dubya. Leaders like… umm… uhh… I’ll get back to you.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill… The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions–this is, always and on every issue, the administration’s default position–but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

The Bushies namecalling and appealing to emotion to defend a disastrous mess? Ridiculous! Go stand in the corner, next to Al Gore.

If they’d really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done–actually and believably done–the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

There you go. In order to enact a fair and compassionate immigration policy, we must first start with the good parts of the immigration bill, like building a giant 800-foot wall, and then we can see about the icky parts, like giving immigrants a chance at citizenship… maybe, if we get around to it.

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

Clearly, you have to get up pretty early in the evening to put one over on the conservatives.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.

Wow, and it only took you four years to figure that out! (Conveniently just after the election, I might add.) That makes you one of the smart ones!

[Bush] was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than time.

Courage? Serious thinking? Letting go? Y’all are FUCKED. I know you all think that courage and serious thinking are your core competencies, but reality and history says otherwise. What will really happen is that you’ll just crank up the war and terrorism and taxes and scary gay marriage and whatever other boogeymen you can conjure up to convince the base that it will be The End Of America if those weak godless homofascist Democrats win.

One year now, Noonan will have no memory of ever writing this column, and will be breathlessly salivating over the manliness of Rudy/John/Fred/Newt’s codpiece. Short attention spans are the Republicans’ most powerful weapon.

9 comments June 1st, 2007 at 11:14am Posted by Eli

Immigrationland

Maybe it’s a cultural gap, but this seems very, very strange to me:

CLAD in black clothes and moonlight, our guide Poncho adjusted his ski mask and faced us to speak. The desert has claimed many lives, he said, but tonight we would make it across the border.

The night was crisp and clear in the central Mexican highlands, the moon illuminating mesquite trees, cactus and pastures. Our group of 13 was about to set out on one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.

(…)

The four-hour caminata nocturna — nighttime hike — traverses desert, hills, brambles and riverbeds in the Parque EcoAlberto, an eco-park communally owned by the Hñahñu Indians who live on some 3,000 acres of land in the state of Hidalgo, about three hours northwest of Mexico City (and roughly 700 miles from the border).

Organizers say they opened the park about two and a half years ago, with financing from the Mexican government, and began the caminata as a way to offer tourists a taste of life as an illegal immigrant.

(…)

Park guides say about 3,000 tourists — mostly Mexican — have hiked the caminata since it began in July 2004. It costs 200 pesos (about $18 at 11 pesos to the dollar), and tourists who want to stick around at the park can also go river-rafting, rappel down a cliff and sleep in cabins with roofs of maguey leaves. But guides say the mock border-crossing is the park’s main draw.

“Of course it’s just a game, where you’re always safe and where there are no real fights,” said Antonio Flores, a sociology professor from Querétaro, in central Mexico, who hiked the caminata in November with a group of students. “It was very interesting, very important. Often, immigration is a subject so far away. This gave us a chance to experience it through our own steps.”

I’m really not entirely sure what to make of this…

Add comment February 7th, 2007 at 08:28pm Posted by Eli

Liz, Meet Gail. Gail, Meet Liz.

In case anyone doubted that there is an impermeable wall between News and Opinion…

Liz Bumiller’s “news analysis” of Bush’s address on immigration:

The headline news from President Bush’s immigration speech on Monday was troops to the border, but in substance and tone the address reflected the more subtle approach of a man shaped by Texas border-state politics and longtime personal views.

(Oh yeah, Bush is Mr. Nuance.)

What was remarkable to people who knew Mr. Bush in Texas was how much he still believes in the power of immigration to invigorate the nation.

“He’s always had a more welcoming attitude,” said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential scholar at the University of Texas. “He always spoke well of Mexican nationals and regarded them as hard-working people. So his grace notes on this subject are high.”

(snip)

“He understands this community in the way you do when you live in a border state,” said Israel Hernandez, an assistant secretary at the Commerce Department who traveled with Mr. Bush as a personal aide when he first ran for governor. “Philosophically, he understands why people want to come to the U.S. And he doesn’t consider them a threat.”

Today’s NYT lead editorial:

President Bush’s speech from the Oval Office last night was not a blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform. It was a victory for the fear-stricken fringe of the debate.

These are the people who say illegal border crossings must be stopped immediately, with military boots in the desert sand. Never mind the overwhelming burdens of Iraq and Afghanistan, the absence of a coherent and balanced immigration policy, and the broad public support for a comprehensive solution. America must send its overtaxed troops to the border right now, they say, so a swarm of ruthless, visa-less workers cannot bury our way of life under a relentless onslaught of hard work.

Rather than standing up for truth, Mr. Bush swiveled last night in the direction of those who see immigration, with delusional clarity, as entirely a problem of barricades and bad guys. His plan to deploy “up to 6,000″ National Guard troops to free the Border Patrol to hunt illegal immigrants is a model of stark simplicity, one sure to hearten the Minuteman vigilantes, frightened conspiracy theorists, English-only Latinophobes, right-wing radio and TV personalities, and members of Congress who have no patience for sorting out the various and mixed blessings that surging immigration has given this country.

Suddenly, I’m hearing the “fight theme” from Star Trek (Brrr-AH!)…

2 comments May 16th, 2006 at 11:49am Posted by Eli

Yo Soy El Smoothador.

Oh, this’ll really win over the Hispanic vote…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The national anthem should be sung in English — not Spanish — President Bush declared Friday, amid growing restlessness over the millions of immigrants here illegally.

“One of the things that’s very important is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul,” the president exclaimed. “One of the great things about America is that we’ve been able to take people from all walks of life bound as one nation under God. And that’s the challenge ahead of us.”

A Spanish language version of the national anthem was released Friday by a British music producer, Adam Kidron, who said he wanted to honor America’s immigrants.

When the president was asked at a Rose Garden question-and-answer session whether the anthem should be sung in Spanish, he replied: “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.”

Sounds like Dubya’s been getting his talking points from Lou “I Don’t Believe In St. Patrick’s Day Parades” Dobbs (would this make him “Dobbsya”?). It’s basically a great big fuck-you to any immigrants who want to embrace America on their own cultural terms.

So, George, if you’re worried about our “national soul,” how about banning and denouncing torture? How about not pissing all over the Constitution in the pursuit of naked power? How about not lying us into any more disastrous unprovoked wars? How about, oh I don’t know, for once in your worthless wretched life doing something that makes me proud of my country instead of ashamed? I realize that anything more complicated than quitting is probably beyond your meager abilities, and that’s fine. Just do what you can - you’ll be amazed at how grateful everyone will be.

Oh, and you might want to consider learning English, too…

Add comment April 28th, 2006 at 03:44pm Posted by Eli

Bush’s Top Secret Immigration Plan Revealed

I have figured out the President’s subtle-yet-devastatingly-effective secret plan to curb illegal immigration once and for all. The mistake his predecessors have made has been to focus only on enforcement and interdiction. Bush is the first president forward-thinking and creative enough to focus on the demand side of the immigration equation.

The Bush Immigration Plan, in a nutshell, is to make America such an economic, legal, and political wasteland that no self-respecting Mexican would ever want to live here. It is a strategy he is uniquely qualified to execute, and he is pursuing it with single-minded dedication.

President Fox had better start thinking about what his immigration policy is going to be…

2 comments April 1st, 2006 at 07:25pm Posted by Eli