Television 'Hulk' actor Lou Ferrigno has joined an Arizona sheriff's posse targeting illegal immigrants in the Phoenix valley area, the sheriff's office said on Wednesday.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Ferrigno, 59, a body builder who donned green makeup to star in the popular 1970s television series 'The Incredible Hulk,' was among 56 people sworn in as volunteers for an armed immigration posse.
Arpaio said the posse would work with sheriff's deputies in operations targeting smugglers and businesses suspected of employing illegal immigrants in the county, among other duties.
Also sworn in alongside Ferrigno: Steven Segal, world's biggest wanker action star.
As a protester who showed up at the event said:
"They must have sunk pretty low in their career to stand by Sheriff Joe Arpaio."
This whole scheme gives me the willies. You just know it's going to turn out badly, for everyone involved.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Michigan Republican leader Saul Anuzis is the front-runner to replace Michael Steele as chairman of the Republican National Committee.
We're sorry to see Steele go, because he's provided so much amusement over the years. But where Steele never failed to provide us truckloads of Republican dumbassery, Anuzis may more than make up for it in far-right wingnuttery.
But Anuzis' thing about fascists goes much deeper than that, as Heidi Beirich at the SPLC noted earlier this week. Because Anuzis has not only long maintained an association with one of Michigan's leading young white supremacists -- a former campus activist named Kyle Bristow -- he has adamantly defended him:
Bristow led the Michigan State University campus branch of Young Americans For Freedom (MSU-YAF) and was so virulent in his politics that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) began listing it as a hate group in 2006. Bristow also served as a Republican precinct delegate.
Bristow’s MSU-YAF engaged in extensive racist activities. One of its first stunts was presenting a 13-point agenda that would have established a “Caucasian caucus” at MSU and, in turn, eliminated all student government representation for practically every other non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male or non-Christian student group at the university. Bristow was on record saying, “Homosexuality kills people almost to a degree worse than cigarettes. … these [pro-gay rights] groups are complicit with murder.” MSU-YAF sponsored a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” contest, held a “Koran Desecration” competition, jokingly threatened to distribute smallpox-infested blankets to Native American students, and posted “Gays Spread AIDS” fliers across campus. Bristow’s YAF also brought several extremists to speak at the MSU campus, including Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, leader of the whites-only British National Party (for more on YAF, read here).
None of this seemed to bother Anuzis. “This [Bristow] is exactly the type of young kid we want out there,” Anuzis, then already the GOP state chair, said on a radio program in May 2007, the year after MSU-YAF’s more outrageous activities were made public. “I’ve known Kyle for years and I can tell you I have never heard him say a racist or bigoted or sexist thing, ever.” Just this past October, Anuzis’ Michigan GOP issued a press release attacking a Democratic candidate for secretary of state because she once interned at the SPLC, which the release said used “fear and intimidation” in its hate group listings.
Since receiving this outpouring of support from Anuzis, Bristow has graduated to the top ranks of the American radical right. Now a law student at the University of Toledo, Bristow recently self-published a novel, White Apocalypse, whose plot revolves around a series of violent revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and Native American activists. A major subplot ends in the bloody assassination of a character apparently based on an SPLC staffer. Several notable white supremacists and anti-Semites have endorsed the novel.
Anuzis compounded the creepout factor Monday, when he went on Neil Cavuto's Fox show and said:
Anuzis: And I think we've got to get back to the fundamentals -- find somebody's who's basically going to make sure the trains run on time, raise the money, and then implement the best get-out-the-vote program Republicans possibly have in 2012.
Seem fitting, though, that Anuzis is being heavily backed by the Tea Party as well -- which is why he was so adamant in his support for the Tea Party's influence in the GOP.
My latest post is up at SPLC's Hatewatch. It's all about everyone's favorite white supremacist and how he's becoming concerned about our morality these days -- hahahahaha ....
Now that he's gaining in years, longtime white-supremacy advocate David Duke, who in his youth gained a notorious reputation as a womanizing playboy, is apparently now shifting to a more traditional role of moralizing geezer. Witness his most recent video "lecture," wherein he lectures his audience (such as it is) on the historical roots of the "sexual revolution" – which, in Duke's view, is the product of Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, and therefore is yet another civilization-destroying product of product of conniving Jews:
Duke: Wherever the globalist media reaches on this planet, there is an ongoing sexual revolution. It should be called sexual dehumanization. In traditional Western culture, sex is idealized and embedded with the idea of family and children and the deep and sacred respect for the love between a man and a woman, and marriage as a beautiful, even holy, institution. A perfect example of the veneration of womanhood, fidelity and purity, as expressed in countless artworks, is the Virgin Mary. The Madonna is also venerated in the Muslim Koran, which defends Mary from the Jewish Talmudic slanders that claim Mary was a whore and Jesus a bastard. I hate to quote those words. Today the name Madonna fits the Talmudic slander. It's the image of a degenerate superstar whore, engaging in gang sex and mocking the crucifixion. The latest media-promoted female phenom is Lady Gaga, and this teen idol is also depicted engaging in gang sex, sadism, masochism, and other forms of degeneracy, along with her trendy music. Now this is the hottest new star promoted by the Jewish controlled globalist media, including MTV – Sumner Redstone. Real name: Rothstein. The media of the Western world, and thus of the whole globe, has become a weapon of mass destruction of the highest in human values. The human cost has been enormous. Hundreds of millions of families have been destroyed. Children now commonly grow up without fathers. Sexually rooted epidemics, including STDs, hepatitis and HPV are now soaring. AIDS, a disease primarily of promiscuity, will cost hundreds of millions of lives. Millions of people have suffered sterility, and will never know the joy of children. Child rape, molestation, and abuse has grown exponentially.
Nevermind the hypocrisy of the nation's foremost practitioner of racial and ethnic dehumanization lecturing us about "sexual dehumanization." What's agonizingly hilarious about this diatribe is how starkly Duke's new moral ethos contrasts with his own personal behavior over the years.
This exchange among three right-wing Fauxheads -- Ann Coulter, who is adamantly opposed to the TSA's new airport bodyscans (hmmmmmm .... OK, not gonna go there), Peter Johnson, a longtime BushCo apologist who thinks they're just fine, and Sean Hannity, who just wants to be pals with all things RightWing -- really isn't particularly enlightening.
But it sure is entertaining. Especially because Johnson won't let Coulter get away with her vague platitudes -- Coulter, of course, thinks we can just do away with the scans and instead rely on good ol' American racial profiling, -- and so he insists on pointing out that Coulter has no solutions for dealing with the kinds of threats the bodyscans are intended to prevent. (I'm not so sure Johnson is right about the need for the scans, but that doesn't make Coulter anything other than the dead wrong she usually is.) So Coulter shrieks at him to shut up, when in fact he's just engaging in the standard Fox-style talk-show behavior, where interruption is the norm. Indeed, Coulter is a past master of this form.
It's ironic, isn't it, that all the talking heads on Fox -- Sean Hannity in particular -- were calling Lisa Murkowski a "sore loser" for refusing to accept her defeat in the Alaska primary at the hands of Tea Party militiaman Joe Miller and proceeding with a write-in challenge.
Now that the tables have turned and it's clear that Murkowski has won, it's self-evident that it's Miller who is the REAL sore loser, refusing still to concede even though everyone on the planet can see he's lost.
CAVUTO: Are you saying -- I`m sorry, Joe, but do you want a recount? Is that what you are saying?
MILLER: Well, we may. We may actually ask for a hand count of our ballots of well. And that was the benefit that she got. We will probably ask for that as well. But we will wait and see when these numbers finally sort out here at the end of the week.
According to Fox News, the canceled summit meeting between President Obama and Republican House leaders to discuss the extension of the Bush tax cuts was just a matter of conflicting schedules.
The roots of the partisan standoff that led to the postponement of the bipartisan White House summit scheduled for Thursday date back to January, when President Barack Obama crashed a GOP meeting in Baltimore to deliver a humiliating rebuke of House Republicans.
Obama's last-minute decision to address the House GOP retreat - and the one-sided televised presidential lecture many Republicans decried as a political ambush - has left a lingering distrust of Obama invitations and a wariness about accommodating every scheduling request emanating from the West Wing, aides tell POLITICO.
"He has a ways to go to rebuild the trust," said a top Republican Hill staffer. "The Baltimore thing was unbelievable. There were [House Republicans] who only knew Obama was coming when they saw Secret Service guys scouting out the place."
WTF? Are these guys kidding? Or are they just not even bothering to come up with halfway decent lies anymore?
So was it an ambush? Well, My God, not even close. Here's the press release from Mike Pence, Chairman of the House Republican Conference, thanking the president on January 13th for "accept[ing] our invitation to meet with the Republican Conference later this month." And here's the Politico's write up from January 12th, the day before. In other words, that's more than two weeks before these House Republicans who must have spent the month in a sensory deprivation chamber were stunned to see the president's motorcade driving up unannounced to crash their party. And if they'd forgotten here's the write-up from The Hill the day before the event ...
Emboldened by an unexpected victory in Massachusetts and frustrated with a "partisan" State of the Union address, House Republicans are eager to meet with President Barack Obama on Friday.
So here they are all gunned up and eagerly awaiting President Obama's ambush of them that they didn't know anything about.
And as Marshall explains, this was really about GOP hubris gone bad:
It was clear that for the House GOP this was inviting the president to meet them on their turf rather than at the White House where opposition leaders are always put in a somewhat diminished position just because of the trappings of the place. And by the time the event rolled around, Scott Brown had won the Massachusetts Senate race. So, as The Hill put it, the House Republicans were "eager" to meet with the president.
Only it didn't work out according to plan. The president came, talked, took questions. And with the president there making his own arguments it was much more difficult for folks like Pence and others to claim, unrebutted, that Health Care Reform was going to cost $50 trillion, enforce mandatory castration and have one out of five grannies ritually slaughtered on a stone slab the bend the cost curve for longterm care. Put simply, the Republicans came off looking kind of stupid, unable to make their arguments when the president was there to point out the holes in their arguments. In this case, I was sympathetic to the president and to reform. So I'm sure people who didn't share those sympathies saw the whole encounter differently. But House Republicans' reaction then and now suggests they saw it pretty much as I did -- that the president embarrassed them. Not by crashing the event, or ambushing them. But just because he did better at it than they thought he would and they didn't do well at all. They invited him to make him look diminished. But he ended up making them look unserious and unprepared because they weren't able to respond when he pointed out the holes in their arguments.
All of which means that this whole storyline of the president wrongfooting them or showing up uninvited is made up out of whole cloth. And the real story is that they're not confident it won't happen again if they have some sort of public encounter with him.
I can understand why they want to run. Because face to face with Obama, they won't be able to get with the kind of crap they get away with in the media, particularly on Fox, in evading a simple truth:
Republicans must choose between reducing the deficit and preserving the tax cuts for the wealthy, because they cannot have both. It's a simple impossibility, and they know it, and Obama knows it.
And letting the public see Obama expose their mendacity as thoroughly as he did in Baltimore is something they're going to have to try to figure out before they dare tangle with him again. It will be interesting to see which tactic they deploy, won't it?
It's pretty bizarre, really, that we've now gotten to the point where Ann Coulter can go off on Bill O'Reilly's show last night with a bigoted rant demanding the TSA drop its body scans and instead revert to ethnic profiling of Muslim males -- and nobody even bothers to notice much.
Coulter's thesis, for what it's worth, is really proof of the triumph of ignorance in conservative ranks. She wants the TSA to simply start profiling Muslims, particularly young males, for complete screenings and let the rest of us go. But as we've explained previously, these kinds of measures are absurdly ineffective and actually make you more vulnerable, because they make it easy for terrorists to game the system:
If you want to profile every "known Muslim," you're going to have a hell of a time in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, considering that their populations are a mix of the world's religions, and any Muslim who wanted to pose as a member of, say, a Christian church in order to fool authorities could do so with ease.
This just underscores how foolish the whole notion of racial profiling actually is, because when you embark on such policies, they actually make you more vulnerable, not less.
That's because terrorists are not that stupid. If you begin profiling for Middle Eastern men, they will find Indonesian or African or European operatives to perform the same task. If you begin profiling for Muslims, they will find ways to conceal their religious preferences.
We know two things about profiling, especially ethnic, religious, or racial profiling: 1) These policies expose the profilers to being gamed by terrorists; and 2) They are always a tremendous waste of resources and inevitably are counter-productive.
But even beyond the obvious ignorance, what's remarkable about Coulter's rant is just how nakedly bigoted it is. She practically spits out the epithets:
Coulter: I think the point is, as many have said, this is Hitler's last revenge. The one thing we won't look at is who is doing this. ...
... In this asymmetrical warfare, we have no advantages. We're not at war with a country. They are not fighting by the rules of war. If a Martian landed, he would say, 'The one advantage you guys have is, they all look alike. They're all foreign born. They're all male. They're all between a certain age group. They're all Muslim.
... If we had been attacked by Swedish terrorists, this would not even be an issue. It's only because our terrorists are from Third World countries that we will not even look at profiling them.
This is patently absurd, of course; after Oklahoma City, no one considered profiling white male American veterans as potential terror suspects. Indeed, the only reason it's an issue is that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by identifiable Others.
What's kind of remarkable about this is that there's nothing really remarkable about Coulter's bigotry anymore. It's become such an ingrained part of the right-wing schtick that it takes something really overt and outrageous to even get our attention anymore.
They've gotten some of the attention. In that context, Coulter's bigotry is pretty standard, tame and lame. She's not even out there pushing the envelope anymore, which used to be her role.
It is clear to me that most people in journalism and (non-right wing) blogging do not listen to right wing talk radio very often and simply cannot believe it when critics who report what they are saying. For instance, Andrew Sullivan seems to think this comment by Limbaugh is beyond the pale. It is. But it is so commonplace as to nearly be unworthy of mention by people who listen to his show regularly. Indeed, the idea that it's particularly shocking because it's "self-conscious" is laughable. That's his whole schtick. Just this week he's been winking and chuckling about this "Driving Miss Nancy" theme, sarcastically pretending that he's sticking up for the African American Clyburn, when it's quite obvious he's playing to his bigoted and sexist listeners.
I realize that it's hard to believe that Americans are this obnoxious. It's probably even harder to believe they are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to promote this bigotry on the radio to millions of other Americans, but they are --- they are speaking the language of eliminationism and hate day after day after day. If it soothes you to believe that those who are alarmed by that are the intemperate ones so be it, but it doesn't change what they are doing or the effect it's had on our politics.
It's getting bad when remarks that, 15 years ago, would have gotten you fired now barely even rate a raised eyebrow.
OK, here's your daily bit of comedy, courtesy of Glenn Beck ...
Yesterday, Beck brought his Black Robe pal, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, on to support his latest theory: that the new European Union Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, is actually designed to look like the Tower of Babel. Or at least, one well-known version of it.
Beck showed the two buildings side by side, then launched into a long disquisition on the Biblical meaning of the Tower of Babel (zzzzzzzzz) and then wrapped it all up thus:
Beck: You're not saying, Rabbi, that they intentionally are building the Tower of Babel.
Lapin: I think they are. I really do. I do believe and was told that the design of the headquarters of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, was -- designers were asked to make it resemble the Tower of Babel.
Beck: They said -- because we called -- we tried to verify, and what they say is, [laughs] they're just reflecting like the Coliseum.
Lapin: Yeah, that's what we want to build in Europe -- right? A place where Christians got fed to lions.
Too funny. Of course, as a matter of fact, as the Wikipedia entry notes (citing a press release): "The architects were inspired by Roman amphitheatres."
I'm willing to wager that Rabbi Lapin's "source" for his information that designers intended the EU Parliament to look like the Tower of Babel is never made public. But then, this is a guy who already has quite a history of wingnuttery. There's a reason, after all, that David Duke loves to quote Lapin.
I recently was added to the team over at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, and my first post is up -- this one concerning an "Internet yob" (as they called him in one Aussie headline) from Ohio creating an international incident Down Under:
Jarred Hensley is a white supremacist who likes to hurt people. He did prison time for it. And now he's figured out a way to hurt people and even break a country's laws without having to do jail time. Along the way, he's also caused something of an international uproar on the Internet.
Hensley is a Cincinnati-based activist in the Imperial Klans of America, one who already brought serious trouble to the organization. In 2006, he and fellow IKA member Andrew R. Watkins brutally assaulted a 16-year-old in rural Kentucky because they thought he was Latino; the pair spent three years in prison for the attack, and the SPLC brought a lawsuit against the IKA that resulted in a $2.5 million judgment against the hate group.
Now Hensley – out of prison and evidently with a lot of time on his hands – has joined the ranks of Internet "trolls" who haunt the Web and harass people for various reasons, including leaving ugly messages for bereaved family members and friends of the deceased. (A recent New York Times Magazine piece explored their weird world in depth.) This kind of activity, as it happens, is illegal in many nations, including Great Britain (where one "troll" was recently jailed for polluting a tribute site for a former reality-TV star) and Australia. Which is where Jarred Hensley came in.
Somehow it's not exactly surprising that, for his Image Makeover Media Tour, George W. Bush decided to make Fox News the center of his activity last week. After all, if you can get a Hannity Job, an O'Reilly-pretending-to-be-tough-guy-while-lobbing-softballs interview, and a meek Greta Van Susteren appearance in all in one week, you've pretty much hit the trifecta of major Fox News hosts.
But there was one big-name Fox News anchor Bush didn't sit down with. Hmmmmmmm. Wonder why.
This is why they called George Bush a fascist. Because progressives know what's at the end of the progressive road -- Nazis or Communists! Someone has to control your life. Someone will be at the controls.
Actually, when I heard this, I thought "wow, this guy, I mean he proves my point." He's right -- if, if you say, those people with George Bush, they thought he was okay and they didn't do anything about it. He's right if that's really what you thought about George W. Bush and you were wide awake, because then you'd be part of the progressive movement, and that makes my point on the railroad tracks.
BECK: What has [Obama] done that is different? I think he’s done exactly what George Bush was doing, except to the times of a thousand. I mean we’re talking about a progressive. And George Bush was a progressive. It’s the difference between a steam train and the space shuttle.
Funny thing about this? Just three years ago, Beck was being invited to the Bush White House for personal one-on-one sessions with the then-president -- and Beck was boasting about it:
Ah well. Beck has bigger fish to fry these days. And so does George Bush.
As Phillips explains, this shift came about because both political parties in Washington -- well fed with Wall Street money -- decided America's economic future lay in the financial sector, not in manufacturing.
Phillips describes in detail how the financial-services sector came to be seen within the Beltway as "the winner" for politicians to back as the nation’s economic workhorse, fueled in no small part by the ongoing activities of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, even as the nation’s manufacturing capacity was slowly being gutted. He explores how this was facilitated by Republican governance this past decade, particularly from a Bush White House that favored the familial oligarchical approach to economics, and rapidly accelerated during the post-9/11 push to expand credit. This was manifested in the "securitization" mania that took root in the context of a "Wild West" milieu for all kinds of moneymaking devices, especially low-interest adjustable-rate mortgages.
In the process, both of America's political parties have largely been subsumed by the financial-services sector. The most recent manifestation of this is the work of the supposedly bipartisan Catfood Commission, whose recommendations, if followed, would produce "a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans," according to Paul Krugman.
What's particularly striking about its work is that it quite patently intends to place all the burden for solving the deficit on the backs of working people (mainly through serious Social Security cutbacks) while steadfastly refusing to consider new ways of improving its revenues, as Matt Yglesias has observed.
And atop that list of ignored potential revenue sources: The financial sector.
The deficit report put out by the commission's co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, had one striking omission. It does not includes plans for a Wall Street speculation tax or any other tax on the financial industry.
This omission is striking because the co-chairs made a big point of saying that they looked everywhere to save money and/or raise revenue. As Senator Simpson said: "We have harpooned every whale in the ocean - and some minnows." Wall Street is one whale that appears to have dodged the harpoon.
This omission is made more striking by the fact that at least one member of the commission, Andy Stern, has long been an advocate of such taxes. Presumably he raised this issue in the commission meetings and the co-chairs chose to ignore him.
The co-chairs apparently also chose to ignore the I.M.F.. Noting the waste and extraordinary economic rents in the sector, the I.M.F. has explicitly recommended a substantial increase in taxes on the financial industry. It is even more striking that the co-chairs apparently never considered a speculation tax since Wall Street's reckless greed is at the center of the current economic crisis.
Indeed. You always hear from "fiscal conservatives" that taxes should only be applied to activities that you want to discourage or hold in check. Well, there you go.
In this context, it is worth noting that one of the co-chairs, Erskine Bowles, is literally on Wall Street's payroll. He earned $335,000 last year for his role as a member of Morgan Stanley's (one of the bailed out banks) board of directors. Morgan Stanley would likely see a large hit to its profits from a financial speculation tax.
It would have been appropriate for the reporters covering the report to ask about a financial speculation tax. It would also be appropriate to explore the connection between Mr. Bowles role as a Morgan Stanley director and the absence of any financial taxes in this far-reaching report.
Until we start electing Democrats who really want to put Americans back to work making things and recognize that Wall Street's speculative utopia is a global nightmare, we're going to be caught in this trap, and real economic recovery will remain out of reach.
On November 10th, Fox News released their list of America's "toughest sheriffs" on immigration, applauding local law enforcers who want to file suit against Mexico and are encouraging armed vigilante groups in their Counties to name a few notable mentions. Not coincidentally, those named are also America's Worst Sheriff's with Sheriff Arpaio at the top of both lists.
The Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona runs an unaccredited jail facility due to poor standards and is the subject of more than 2,700 lawsuits for civil rights and other violations. Additionally, he's the subject of a two year Department of Justice investigation and an additional criminal investigation for misuse of funds.
That's pretty much backed up by the latest revelations regarding Arpaio's corruption. Eric W. Dolan at Raw Story has the rundown:
A hidden computer database recently discovered in the course of a racial profiling investigation shows Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio misspent up to $80 million in funds intended for jail operations, according to Maricopa County supervisors and budget officials.
The hidden database contained payroll logs that detailed staff assignments and payments which were different than the staff assignments and payments reported in the official county-run database, they said.
"They've developed a system that basically tracks where they are working versus where they are being paid, and they did not update the official database, which led to the potential problems," Deputy County Manager Sandi Wilson told The Arizona Republic. "I think they deliberately hid this info from us."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was re-elected last week with strong support from Hispanic voters, will make one last push in the final days of the 111th Congress to pass legislation allowing illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to earn legal status if they attend college or serve in the U.S. military.
Advocates of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act - better known as the DREAM Act - say Reid has a better chance of passing the bill in the "lame duck" session than he would when the new, divided Congress is sworn in this January.
The DREAM Act enjoys strong support across party lines. After hearing a brief description, sixty-six percent of voters support the DREAM Act, including majorities of Democrats (81%), independents (60%), and Republicans (57%).
All of which means, of course, that the American Right will throw a hissy fit and do their damnedest to shout the bill down. Leading the shouting, as always, will be the chief organ in their propaganda Wurlitzer: Fox News.
With Jon Scott doing a "fair and balanced" report yesterday on Happening Now, we got a sample of what we've come to expect from Fox's reportage on the DREAM Act: falsehoods and distortions, particularly from Iowa's favorite nutty nativist, Republican Rep. Steve King, who was permitted to lie blatantly about what the act would do.
Just for the record, the law would not "grant amnesty" or create "preferences" for these students:
In fact, Dream Act would allow eligible immigrants to apply for "conditional permanent resident status." The versions of the Dream Act legislation pending in the House and Senate both state that eligible unauthorized immigrants could have their status adjusted to "conditional permanent resident status" which "shall be valid for a period of 6 years" and subject to termination should the individual cease to be eligible. Conditional permanent resident status is only available under the Dream Act to those who were under 16 years of age when they came to the country, have good moral character, and have earned a high school diploma/GED or been admitted to an institution of higher education.
... Dream Act does not give eligible students a special "preference" over citizens or permanent residents. As the Congressional Research Service explained in a February 3 report, unlike other legal permanent residents, Dream Act students would have restricted access to federal student financial aid. CRS stated of the Senate bill:
S. 729 would place restrictions on the eligibility of aliens who adjust to LPR status under its provisions for federal student financial aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended. Under that act, LPRs and certain other eligible noncitizens may receive federal financial aid. Aliens adjusting status under S. 729, however, would be eligible only for student loans, federal work-study programs, and services (such as counseling, tutorial services, and mentoring), subject to the applicable requirements. Unlike other LPRs, they would be ineligible for federal Pell Grants or federal supplemental educational opportunity grants.
Scott performed his "balancing" duties by inviting on Lizette Olmos of the League of United Latin American Citizens to explain the other side -- which she struggled to do, since Scott insisted on asking inane questions about employment in the USA, never giving her an opportunity to refute King's string of falsehoods. But she at least lent the proceedings a voice of sanity.
But Democrats need to be prepared for the onslaught. Fox certainly is.
Glenn Beck's description of George Soros' actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top. For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say – inaccurately – that there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that's horrific.
While I, too, may disagree with many of Soros' views and analysis on the issues, to bring in this kind of innuendo about his past is unacceptable. To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.
The Holocaust was a horrific time, and many people had to make excruciating choices to ensure their survival. George Soros has been forthright about his childhood experiences and his family's history, and there the matter should rest.
QUESTIONER: The question is what whether we need and whether Mr. Soros and his foundations can help to bring more foreign influence in the United States instead of relying on what is essentially a balance between Democrats and conservative Republicans.
SOROS: I think you put your finger on a very important flaw in the current world order, and that is that only Americans have a vote in Congress. And yet, it is the United States that basically determines policy for the world. That is a flaw in the current setup.
To which Beck observes:
BECK: It's a problem for him that people in China or France don't get to vote, find out who sits in Congress. Is it for you? You need to make a choice. Mr. Soros has made his choice. I have made mine. Tonight you decide.
Q: The question is whether we need and whether Mr. Soros and his foundations can help to bring more foreign influence into the United States instead of relying on what is essentially a balance between Democrats and conservative Republicans, which hasn't worked and is not about to start working.
SOROS: Look, I think -- I think you put your finger on a very important flaw in the current world order, and that is that only Americans have a vote in Congress. And yet, it is the United States that basically determines policy for the world. That is a flaw in the current setup. I don't think you can correct it by giving the Chinese government a vote in Congress. But it is a flaw, and I think this is where American leadership is needed, to take into account and respect the interests of others as well, in order to retain the dominant position we currently enjoy.
Soros actually said something that directly contradicted Beck's characterization of his views -- so of course, Beck omitted it.
This sort of journalistic fraud happens all the time at Fox, and plenty of it on Beck's show (we all recall how he pulled the same stunt with Anita Dunn.) It's one of the major reasons you can point to Fox's practices and clearly judge that this is not a news operation but a propaganda mill.
Fox stood by Mr. Beck. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president at Fox News, said in a statement Thursday afternoon that the "information regarding Mr. Soros's experiences growing up were taken directly from his writings and from interviews given by him to the media, and no negative opinion was offered as to his actions as a child."
I wonder how long that will last. Already Beck admitted on his radio show that Fox executives have expressed their discomfort to Beck -- which he, of course, airily dismissed ("It's just not worth it, guys").
Watching Fox News is always a bit of a funhouse mirror, like going down Alice's rabbit hole and sitting down for a sip at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
Last night, Sean Hannity and Brent Bozell of the right-wing propaganda outfit Media Research Center were all aghast at a boneheaded segment on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC show featuring Ted Rall talking about the value of armed revolution to bring about change in America:
Hannity: They're unhinged. The Anointed One is elected, and the anchors would thrill up and down their legs and up every part of their body. Now all of a sudden conservatives win, because there's a repudiation of Obama and his liberal agenda, and now the suggestion of a revolution.
Bozell: Sean, now remember, we're the haters. Just hold that thought for a second. This is what his guest actually said on the show. He said, "The government, the corporations and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an axis of evil. Are we going to fight back. Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?" This is a man who is a guest on this MSNBC show -- and utter silence from the hypocritical left, that they have that kind of person on there, but yet we are the haters.
Sean, I've asked this question a million times: Would you last -- if you had that kind of a guest on, that your show wouldn't be over before Roger Ailes fired you?
Hannity: Probably.
Bozell: Correct?
Hannity: There's a double standard. We all know this. I mean, it's transparent.
Bozell: The double standard is, Fox doesn't do that. You all would never allow on your show as your guest someone advocating violence in America.
Well, I dunno about guests, but what about Sean Hannity himself?
You may recall, as John and I explained in Over the Cliff, that it was Hannity who came unhinged immediately after the 2008 election of "the Anointed One" and began making suggestions of a revolution:
Hannity had made plain his intentions even before the inauguration. At his Web site, he began organizing in December what he called “the conservative underground” and asking people to “join the resistance” to the Obama administration. At the site’s discussion forum, one of his regulars posted an online poll asking respondents to answer: “What kind of revolution appeals most to you?” The possible answers: "A. Military Coup. B. Armed Rebellion. C. War for Secession."
Then, shortly after the inauguration of Obama, we got this:
The whole segment, as you'll see, almost explicitly urges an armed revolution to preserve "the tree of liberty". As Ellen at NewsHounds noted:
Hannity concluded by saying, “This administration has plucked the tree of liberty bare. It took more than 200 years but it now looks like we are headed back to where we started.” Meaning revolution? Hannity never said one way or the other.
It also has to be observed that you don't need to explicitly encourage acts of violence in order to inspire them. All Bill O'Reilly had to do was call Dr. George Tiller a "baby killer" 28 times on his national broadcasts to inspire someone one to walk into a church and shoot him in the head. All Glenn Beck had to do was rant endlessly about how evil the Tides Foundation is to inspire someone to plan an armed attack on their offices.
Likewise with Hannity, whose show the past couple of years has been an endless stream of extreme rhetoric explicitly designed to unhinge its audience. Maybe the apotheosis of this are the numerous times he has invited on various guests who promote wild conspiracy theories about President Obama's "socialist agenda," ranging from WorldNutDaily kooks to Jerome Corsi (but I repeat myself) to even Newt Gingrich:
Hannity was openly promoting Gingrich's story line, to wit, that President Obama and the evil liberals are going to destroy America by instituting a "secular socialist" state. Hannity could scarcely contain himself as they contemplated Obama's supposed deep-seated radicalism.
Hannity, you see, believes with Gingrich that "we are in a battle for the heart and soul of America -- in fact, the greatest battle since the Civil War."
And of course, we heard from a number of conservative figures -- notably Sharron Angle and Walter Williams who proposed a "Second Amendment solution" should things not work out at the ballot box.
Watson asked if violence would be an option in 2010, under the current government.
"The option is on the table. I don't think that we should remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms," Broden said, without elaborating.
Well, we could go on all day. But the point isn't really so much that the right advocates violence a great deal more than the left, though we can demonstrate that all day.
And let's be clear: I'm someone who will consistently repudiate the Ted Ralls of the Left who think somehow that violence is any kind of solution. But they are few and far between, and enjoy very little influence among progressives.
The whole story took an even more bizarre twist yesterday when one of Kaufman's fans, apparently angry after watching a Rachel Maddow segment on the West/Kaufman saga, phoned in a threat to commit violence against schools and post offices, prompting a lockdown of schools in Broward County, Florida:
Thousands of students spent hours locked inside their classrooms Wednesday after a South Florida radio station received a threatening e-mail.
City of Pembroke Pines Police Capt. Dan Rakofsky said authorities lifted the lockdowns after further investigation into a threat sent to a radio station mentioning a mass shooting. "Based on information from the original phone threat this morning, we are confident that that threat has diminished to the point that we can step down the security around the schools somewhat, and the school board has decided to lift the lock down," said Rakofsky.
Rakofsky would not elaborate beyond his statement, only to say police had questioned and released several individuals but are still searching for the person that originally placed the phone call to WFTL 850 AM.
According to Rakofsky, further investigation revealed the same station received an email echoing those same sentiments, much earlier in the morning. Pembroke Pines Police did release a portion of that email, which stated: "I'm planning something big around the government building here in Broward County, maybe a post office, maybe even a school."
The writer said Joyce Kaufman, who is a host at the radio station, inspired the threat. Kaufman happens to have recently been announced as the Chief of Staff to recently elected Florida Rep. Alan West.
Words that Kaufman uttered during a July 4th rally in Fort Lauderdale may have come back to haunt her. "If ballots don't work, bullets will," Kaufman is heard saying.
Those are the words that sources said may have motivated a South Florida man to make threats of unthinkable violence. Seven News was told the man was watching MSNBC Tuesday night when a clip from the rally was shown. Sources believe Kaufman's words motivated him to write a threatening Email, which was sent to a radio station.
Part of the e-mail read: "Something big will happen. "The man's wife then called WFTL with her fears.
The combination set off a chain reaction of a lockdown on all of Broward County schools for most of the day.
The ADL's Abe Foxman is also a child survivor who lived only because his parents turned him over to his Catholic nanny.
“Look, I spit on Jews when I was six years old,” Foxman told me. “Does that make me an anti-Semite?”
The issue of the Shoah “is so sensitive that I'm not even sure Holocaust survivors themselves are willing to make such judgments,” Foxman went on “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that's horrific. It's totally off limits and over the top.”
Beck's comments “were either out of total ignorance or total insensitivity,” he said.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, called the Beck accusations “monstrous; you don't make such accusations without proof, and I have seen no such proof.”
Beck's charges, he said, “go to the heart of the instrumentalization and trivialization of the Holocaust."
Simon Greer, president of the Jewish Funds for Justice, met with Fox News executives in July to discuss Beck's “constant and often inappropriate invocation of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany on the air.”
Greer and Rabbi Steve Gutow of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) received a handwritten note from Beck saying “Please know that I understand the sensitivity and sacred nature of this dark chapter in Human History. Thank you for your candor and helpful thoughts.”
Yesterday's on-air comments by Beck “made a mockery of their professed understanding,” Greer said in a statement. “In an effort to demonize a political opponent, Beck and Fox News scurrilously attacked George Soros, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. No one who truly understands 'the sensitivity and sacred nature' of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mis-characterize the experience of a 13 year old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive.”
Interfaith Alliance President Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy said Beck's “use of the Holocaust to discredit George Soros is beyond repugnant. The Holocaust is one of history’s most tragic events and those who survived it are owed our enduring respect.”
Moreover, as we pointed out, the whole argument is a replication of the classic anti-Semitic argument, largely unchanged from the 1920s:
Here is this conniving, conspiratorial rich international-investor JEW who is buying up all the media in American and surreptitiously seeking to destroy the American economy.
And if the anti-Semitism already weren't already obvious enough from the first day of the smear, Beck dug the hole even deeper yesterday, by opening the hourlong conspiracy-laden smear thus:
Last night, we introduced you to the puppet master, billionaire financier George Soros, notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world. He's known as the man who broke the bank of England. The Prime Minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer. In Thailand, he was branded the "economic war criminal." They also said that he "sucks the blood from people."
When Beck says that "The Prime Minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer," he's referencing former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's anti-Semitic conspiracy that Soros "helped trigger the economic meltdown" of Southeast Asian currencies in 1997. Mahathir was quoted at the time saying: "We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that the Malaysians are mostly Muslim." According to the New York Times, Mahathir "suggested that Malaysia's troubles might be the result of a Jewish 'agenda'" to weaken the country's economy.
Mahathir later denied blaming a Jewish agenda, and conceded that Soros was "not involved in the devaluation of the Malaysian currency," a statement confirmed by the Bank for International Settlements, the New York Times, and Soros himself.
Gertz goes on to explore the many other ways this opening was classic anti-Semitism (particularly the bit about "blood sucking").
But when it comes to Mahatir, his attacks on Soros are only the half of it. Mahatir has a long and unfortunate record of traducing in the ugliest of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and he regularly embarrassed the Asian world with his public rants against Jews and Israel.
We [Muslims] are actually very strong, 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million [during the Holocaust]. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries. And they, this tiny community, have become a world power.
"I am not anti-Semitic ... I am against those Jews who kill Muslims and the Jews who support the killers of Muslims."
He tagged the West as "anti-Muslim", for double standards by "protecting Jews while allowing others to insult Islam." He also said "But when somebody condemns the Muslims, calls my prophet, "terrorist", did the European Union say anything?"
This is someone Glenn Beck considers a credible source for attacking George Soros. All the while claiming he's a big defender of Israel.
Glenn Beck unleashed his long-promised all-out attack on George Soros yesterday, and it was a doozy. Indeed, as both Ellen at NewsHounds and Ben Dimiero at Media Matters point out, in a normative world it would get him fired -- it was so rife with flat-out falsehoods and truly vicious distortions that Beck probably has indeed exposed Fox to a multimillion-dollar slander suit, should Soros choose to pursue it, public figure or not.
MM has compiled the entire hour Here. Meanwhile, Terry Krepel has compiled the list of utterly false things about Soros that Beck wants you to believe.
Anyone familiar with the history of anti-Semitism in America is more than familiar with the architecture of Beck's argument: Here is this conniving, conspiratorial rich international-investor JEW who is buying up all the media in American and surreptitiously seeking to destroy the American economy. The only thing new here is that Soros, an avowed atheist, has a largely secular "hidden agenda" rather than a religious one.
One of Beck's smears in particular stood out in this regard -- namely, his LaRouchite claim that Soros had participated in "confiscating" Jewish properties:
Beck: His childhood is shocking, dramatic. He grew up in Nazi Europe. Fourteen years old -- he had to help the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors.
He did not grow up in a strong-Jewish household. His mother was a strong anti-Semite -- George Soros' words, not mine -- but when he had to go over and take the lands from the people, his Jewish friends and neighbors who were being sent to the gas chambers -- I can't imagine what that would do to a teenager, anybody, an adult.
Well, what did it do to George Soros? In an interview with Steve Croft, Soros was asked if he felt guilt at all about taking the property from the Jews as a teenager. He responded, no. He also said, quote, 'I don't deny the Jews their national existence. But I don't want to be a part of it.'
The facts: Soros was a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust. From Media Matters:
Michael T. Kaufman wrote in a biography of Soros, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (Knopf, 2002), that Soros' father attempted to protect his family from Nazi persecution by paying an employee of Hungary's Ministry of Agriculture named Baumbach to take in Soros, "ostensibly as his godson." Soros accompanied his "godfather" as he went to oversee the confiscation of property from Hungarian Jews, as Media Matters has noted.
This is also where Coulter actually lies about Soros -- and it's an outrageous lie, too. Soros never was involved in "pointing out Jews" -- he simply accompanied his protector while he carried out his civic duties, which included confiscating property from Jews.
Kroft: And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
Soros: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made.
Kroft: In what way?
Soros: That one should think ahead. One should understand that -- and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a -- a very personal threat of evil.
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.
Kroft: I mean, that's -- that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Soros: Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't ... you don't see the connection. But it was -- it created no -- no problem at all.
Kroft: No feeling of guilt?
Soros: No.
Kroft: For example, that, 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.' None of that?
Soros: Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was -- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in the markets -- that is I weren't there -- of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would - would -- would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the -- whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the -- I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
That's right: The reason Soros didn't feel any guilt is that he in fact was only a spectator and bore no role or responsibility for the confiscation of Jewish property.
Soros actually deserves our respect for having survived the Holocaust -- and Glenn Beck deserves widespread condemnation for reviving the classic anti-Semitic smear about a Jewish "puppet master" conspiring to destroy and control America.
After explaining how he's not at all anti-Semitic, Beck segued directly into common anti-Semitic stereotypes about Soros being at the center of a vast web that is "collapsing our economy" and remaking our government. Elsewhere in the show, he detailed Soros' efforts to create a "media empire" and control the U.S. government. And of course, Beck's central frame for the entire program is that Soros is the "puppet master," devilishly manipulating all other players to his own ends.
I was one of the first to report on the looming demise of the Minutemen border-patrol movement that caught the media's eye a few years ago, and as I explained then:
Today the Minuteman movement is beyond mere disarray; it is in the early stages of complete decay. The arc of the Minutemen's decline and fall happens to trace almost precisely that of previous right-wing populist movements, notably the Klan of the 1920s and the militias of the 1990s. The pattern goes like this: The group is beset by financial manipulators who seem naturally drawn to them. Then, following an initial wave of popularity, the group splinters under the pressure of competing egos into smaller, more virulent entities who then unleash acts of public ugliness and violence that eventually relegate them to the fringes.
But as Gaiutra Bahadur at AlterNet explains in a startling and important piece, that is really just the beginning of a new incarnation for these border vigilantes:
The publicity surrounding the [Shawna Forde] case enabled Garza to recruit hundreds, including former Minutemen, to an alternative group he soon created, The Patriot's Coalition. "A lot of people felt, well, you're a Minuteman, you're a killer," Garza told me, at a truck stop near his home in Cochise County, Arizona. "The name Minuteman has been tainted by organizations that didn't want us at the border, that say we're killers, that we've done harm." Fortunately for Garza and others, their desire to reinvent coincided with a unique opportunity to do so—the emergence of the Tea Party movement on the national political horizon.
As Bahadur explains, the Tea Parties are proving to offer ample recruitment ground for a new generation of Minuteman-style nativists:
Nonetheless, the flirtation between nativists and Tea Partyers that began during the healthcare debate last summer, as coverage for illegal immigrants became a flashpoint, has intensified. The lines between the movements are blurring, as members overlap at the grassroots and leaders make official appearances at each other's events. Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, spoke at the Tea Party's first convention in February. "There's a whole lot of cross-pollination between the Tea Party movement and the anti-immigrant movement," says Marilyn Mayo, co-director of right-wing research for The Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors nativist groups. "We're starting to see a lot of focus on immigration in the Tea Party. It's the next step for them after healthcare."
SB-1070, the Arizona law that requires police to ask for proof of legal residency from people they believe could be undocumented immigrants, has been a catalyst. Activism around the law this summer showcased the chemistry between nativists and various Tea Party groups. The Tea Party Patriots gathered thousands of signatures in favor of the law. The Tea Party Nation co-sponsored a rally in Phoenix on June 5, which proclaimed the backing of the broader patriot movement. The slogans on the T-shirts and buttons for sale there broadcast a wide array of messages and causes not related to immigration, including: "Dictators Prefer Armed Citizens" and "Karl Marx Was Not A Founding Father." An overwhelming 88 percent of Tea Party "true believers" in Washington also back the law, according to a University of Washington poll.
... This affinity with the Tea Party, to the extent that it also leads to backing from a movement with growing political momentum and grassroots energy, promises to lend more clout to anti-immigrant leaders. Take the victory of a dark horse candidate for state assembly in California. The odds were so long for Tim Donnelly—a former Minuteman leader who runs his family's plastics supply business in Twin Peaks—that he couldn't even hire a campaign consultant. But various Tea Party groups went to work for him, and in July he managed to win the Republican primary in a district that votes Republican. He said he couldn't have won without Tea Party volunteers walking precincts and knocking on doors. "It was the way we reached people," he said. "We didn't have the money to reach people in the conventional way." Donnelly said he realized, in the crush of a crowd of thousands at a tax protest in 2009, that the Tea Party movement would far outstrip the Minutemen in reach. It has allowed him to situate anxiety about undocumented workers in the context of a broader anger against a federal government he compared to "King George who kept taxing us, taxing us, taxing us, but never wanted to hear from us." Donnelly campaigned on reproducing Arizona's immigration law in California. It is first on his agenda if elected.
It will be interesting to see what the Tea Parties do with the immigration issue over the next couple of years. One would think they would read the 2010 election results and back away from their natural and growing inclination to indulge in nativist Latino-bashing for awhile.
But it's in their natures. They won't be able to resist.
