Obama calls out Dobbs and Limbaugh

-- by Dave

Well, we've been saying it here for awhile now, but recently, Barack Obama said it too:

At a fundraiser in Florida Thursday night, Barack Obama accused anti-immigrant crusaders Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh of "ginning things up" to such an extent that there was a rise in hate crimes against Hispanics last year.

"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year," Obama said. "If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen."

Politico's Jonathan Martin writes that Limbaugh addressed Obama's remarks on his radio show today and said that the remarks hurt his feelings.

"I actually don't believe this. Barack Obama, in my own state, raising money for his presidential campaign called me xenophobic at a fundraiser," Limbaugh said. "I thought this guy was the unity candidate? Calling me a Xenophobe? Responsible for hate crimes? My feelings are hurt here."

I'm sure we're all just very worried about poor Rush's hurt feelings here, since he's such a sensitive fellow himself who would never dream of hurting anyone else's feelings, let alone demonizing them so deeply and consistently that right-wing nutjobs in his audience set off bombs at federal buildings or commit hate crimes.

Now I wonder if Lou Dobbs will invite Obama onto his show to attempt to "refute" this charge. Or will he just bare his teeth again?

Refuting Goldberg

-- by Dave

Last week I made a trip up to Bellingham to provide a counter-event for local folks in Whatcom County, since Jonah Goldberg was gracing them with his presence to promote Liberal Fascism. It was a fun (if lightly attended) event that gave me a chance to explain what's wrong with Jonah to ordinary folks.

The Bellingham Herald posted a follow-up report:

Jonah Goldberg helps add to public confusion when he applies the term “fascism” to liberals and their policies, freelance writer David Neiwert says.

As Neiwert sees it, the real fascists are white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups whose pedigree can be traced back to the Ku Klux Klan in the South after the Civil War.

Some on the left have long been guilty of misusing “fascism” as a political insult, Neiwert said in a telephone interview, and that appears to be part of the reason for Goldberg’s book.

“What he’s trying to do is refute or repudiate the old left-wing canard that conservatives are fascists,” Neiwert said. “I sympathize with that, actually. Calling (conservatives) that muddies the waters.”

But by replying in kind, Goldberg just makes matters worse, Neiwert said.

“He’s muddying the public’s understanding of something that it’s important for the public to understand,” Neiwert said.

George Bush is no fascist, but neither is Hillary Clinton, Neiwert said.

True fascists are people like Oklahoma City terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Writing in The American Prospect, Neiwert admits that scholars don’t agree on a precise definition of fascism, but he suggests that most would identify it by “its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and … its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age.”

Fascism is also noted for something else, Neiwert wrote: “It has historically always been vigorously — no, viciously — anti-liberal.”

While true American fascists may be few in number, McVeigh proved that the threat they pose is real, Neiwert said.

“It doesn’t take many of them to be a problem,” Neiwert said. “Wild, crazy rhetoric does have consequences.”

Only one minor inaccuracy here: I was a Web producer at MSNBC. I've never done TV production.

Immigration raids: Harbingers of a police state

-- by Dave

It's telling that last week's mass immigration raid in Iowa, during which immigrant workers were rounded up and treated like cattle, was heralded by the whupping of federal helicopters hovering over the town and its meat-processing plant.

One of its warning signs was that the feds showed up a week before and blackened out the windows of the Cattle Congress facility to prepare it for holding large numbers of detainees.

As one of the locals put it:

"What's that all about? You know, what does that sound like? That's just creepy, just things that seem really unAmerican, that seem on the down low," Howard says. "No one should be treated this way. These aren't drug runners. They're not terrorists." Howard calls the raid "political maneuvering" to show people the Bush Administration is doing something on illegal immigration.

As Joshua Holland at AlterNet suggests, the feds' behavior throughout, while "professional" enough, has raised the specter of law enforcement that is all about keeping workers in a state of fear, and leaving the employers who are manipulating them completely unscathed.

According to the Associated Press, an attorney who interviewed some of those swept up in the raid said that the company itself "obtained false identification for immigrant workers." But in the overwhelming majority of these raids -- 98 percent, according to the Washington Post -- the only people to pay any penalty are poor people trying to earn a substandard wage working in America's growing unregulated economy. Meanwhile, ICE charged many of the detained with "identity theft" for those faked papers, effectively giving immigration hard-liners what Congress hasn't granted them through the legislative process: serious criminal charges for what have always been misdemeanor immigration violations at most.

Most of all, it's clear that the plant's owners were in the business of seriously exploiting the illegal status of their workers -- abusing them, underpaying them, exposing them to hazardous working conditions -- and the raids actually had the effect of covering that up: