Reconquista!

-- by Dave

"Mexicans!! Tonight we dine in ... SAN DIEGO!!!!"

Now that's funny.

[Hat tip to the l'il bro. For more on "Reconquista!" see here.]

Huckabee's 120 days

-- by Dave

I've been trying to envision what Mike Huckabee's immigration plan -- the one calling for the deportation of 10 to 12 million "illegal immigrants" within a 120-day period -- would look like.

After all, we're talking about truly enormous numbers. The logistics alone would be daunting: we're talking about rounding up and shipping out 100,000 people a day. These are numbers that make the notorious Palmer Raids of the 1920s look like a drop in the bucket.

Just to get a rough idea what we're talking about, let's review what recent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have looked like.

In Idaho:

One family with members who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents said they were terrified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who came to their home in the predawn hours accompanied by Blaine County sheriff's deputies. No one in their home was arrested.

"They pounded on my door so hard that my walls shook," Dana Ayala, a Wood River Valley resident and U.S. citizen, told the Idaho Community Action Network. "My 19-year-old son opened the door to see what was happening, and six agents armed with guns, Tasers and flashlights pushed their way into my home."

... "It is clear that ICE agents terrorized the community, including U.S. citizen children who were sleeping when the raid occurred," said Leo Morales, a community organizer for ICAN. "In several homes, children were left crying as ICE agents interrogated parents and hauled them away.

Testimonies gathered on Tuesday also indicated that in several instances ICE agents walked into the home looking for individuals not living there, then arrested the people in the home with no proof of immigration status.

In some instances, federal agents rushed into the house when a child opened the door."

Arlington Heights, Ill.:

On the morning of Feb. 27, ICE agents swept into the Cano Packaging Corporation in Arlington Heights, Ill., a mostly middle class, white suburb 25 miles from Chicago. The agents arrested the undocumented immigrants who had been hired by a temporary staffing agency to work at Cano. The nine men and eight women were then bused to a jail, which also serves as a regional immigration detention facility.

Maria de Carmen Santana says she was invasively strip-searched, and told the process was a search for hidden drugs. She was handcuffed so tightly that it left marks on her wrists, she says, and she was unable to get pain medication for severe tendonitis in her ankle.

“It was disgusting how we were treated,” Santana, 46, says in Spanish. “We aren’t murderers. We aren’t drug addicts. Our only crime is being here to work without papers.”

One woman alleges she was denied medical help while vomiting, and another when suffering an intense migraine. An ailing diabetic man was forced to do exercises as punishment for not making his bed. Detainees say the facility’s meal portions left them extremely hungry, and a guard threw out fruit that detainee Leonel Trujillo had stashed in his cell.

Arkadelphia, Ark.:

On Tuesday, July 26, between 30 and 35 children, some as young as three months old, were left stranded when federal agents arrested 119 immigrant workers at the Petit Jean Poultry plant in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. No provisions were made for these children as their parents were carted 70 miles away to a detention center to await deportation.

Many of these families, now forcibly torn apart, had lived and worked at the company for years. Of those detained, 115 were from Mexico, two were from Honduras and the other two were from El Salvador and Guatemala.

This surprise raid caught the town’s mayor, the Clark County sheriff, and the plant manager by surprise, and no provisions were made to care for the children or to alert relatives. The federal agents failed to even contact the Department of Human Services, the agency that is usually responsible for abandoned children.

“A lot of those families had kids in day care in different places, and they didn’t know why Mommy and Daddy didn’t come pick them up,” Arkadelphia Mayor Charles Hollingshead told the Associated Press.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman claimed Friday that every one of the immigrants had lied to the agents, telling them they had no children. He later changed his story, admitting that the detainees did tell the agents that they had children left behind. Still, the agents did not allow the detainees to contact their families to make arrangements for their children.

Jose Luis Vidal told the Associated Press that his sister and brother-in-law left behind children aged ten, five and one when they were deported to Laredo, Mexico.

New Bedford, Mass.:

The heads of three state agencies appeared before the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities to discuss the impact of the March 6raid on New Bedford's children. ...

The raid on Michael Bianco Inc., in which 361 immigrants were arrested, had a huge ripple effect across the immigrant community, according to state officials. Eighty-four children in New Bedford were directly affected by the raid, losing one or both of their parents. Children were left in the care of aunts, uncles, baby-sitters and even landlords. One baby was hospitalized for dehydration after being separated from its nursing mother.

Gov. Deval Patrick has called the raid's impact on families a "humanitarian crisis."

And the trauma is continuing, according to Dennis Gauthier, head of the DSS office in New Bedford.

His agency discovered two days ago that a 16-year-old girl, "living in fear," had been cared for by a landlord for the past two weeks.

DSS has also placed three teenagers who were swept up in the raid in foster care, he said, because ICE would not allow them to be released to parents who are illegal immigrants.

DSS is still pressing ICE to release 10 parents to care for children, including the mother of a 4-year old boy who is not eating and is severely underweight.

"This child needs his mother back," said Mr. Spence, noting that the child is living with his father. "This child is not safe. This child is at risk. Release the mother with a monitoring bracelet, that's what we've asked."

Marshalltown, Iowa:

Like the March 6 raid on the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, in which more than 300 workers were arrested, the Swift operation left some children stranded for hours, and many others in the care of friends and relatives. ICE flew many detainees to an out-of-state federal detention facility before immigrants' advocates had a chance to speak with them about their children. Some detainees were not initially honest with ICE investigators about whether they had children, fearing they, too, would be taken into custody even though some of those children were US citizens.

And like the New Bedford raid, the Swift raids drew harsh criticism from the governor, who criticized ICE's limited cooperation with state officials, including its refusal to release information in a timely fashion on who was detained and where.

Immigration raids nationwide have increased in recent months. Scenes similar to those in New Bedford and Marshalltown have played out in cities like Worthington, Minn., and Stillmore, Ga., where a poultry plant was raided last Labor Day. In Santa Fe, 30 undocumented workers were arrested in a raid in February, and Mayor David Coss said he was outraged that "families are being torn apart, literally."

Richmond, Calif.:

In and around Richmond, Calif., 119 people were arrested in January in a series of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Richmond Mayor Gail McLaughlin said that although authorities characterized those arrested as "criminals and gang bangers," only 18 had criminal convictions.

"I was shocked and disgusted," she said. "The overwhelming majority of their sweeps arrested hard-working men, mothers and school children."

Demographers say about half of working-age illegal immigrants in the United States have children, most of whom are U.S.-born and therefore citizens. Non-profit groups are helping these families prepare for the worst.

Immigrant parents are signing forms designating who should get custody of their children if they're detained or deported. Often, that means a relative with legal status.

This is just a sampling, of course. Now try to imagine, if you will, these kinds of nightmares being amplified by a factor of a half-million or more.

... I know it's hard to imagine such a thing. Because we all know that as the push to search out all 12 million intensifies, so will the ugliness of the raids.

And let's not forget that rounding people up is only the beginning: There is, fortunately, such a thing as due process in America, even for non-citizens, which means that each one of these 10 to 12 million people will have to have their cases reviewed. In the meantime, they'll have to be placed in detention centers.

When you're talking about 100,000 people a day, you're talking numbers well beyond the capacity of any current holding facility or detention center operating in America. And because the need will be ostensibly short-term, that means we'll almost certainly once again be building temporary mass detention centers -- otherwise known as concentration camps.

Of course, this country already has some experience with that. And sure enough, in response simply to the increased demand under Bush's relatively modest push for illegal-immigrant roundups, we're building them again.

Just what kind of America is it that Mike Huckabee envisions? Has anyone thought about what this country will look like -- not just ethnically and racially, but ethically and morally -- after he has his 120 days?

Please explain

-- by Dave

Head-scratcher of the day:

Mike Huckabee, in an interview with Cap'n Ed, regarding the clemency he offered to Wayne Dumond:

"If I'd have known then that I was going to run for president, and I was more interested in my political future than taking my job seriously and being responsible and operating with integrity, I wouldn't have ever -- I would never have done a clemency."

It's pretty hard to comprehend how caving in to frothing Clinton-conspiracy mongers, and in the process releasing a violent rapist who raped and killed again, is anything other than one of the lamest definitions of "integrity" ever concocted.

Nevermind the bizarre logic. (Um, so, Mike: You're saying if you'd known then that you were going to run for president someday, you'd never have operated with integrity? Oh, forget it.) Still ... exactly what kind of defense is that?

Fact is, Huckabee's behavior in the whole Dumond episode was typically Republican: running with the howling pack because that's how you get ahead politically. But in the Bizarro Universe that is the GOP, I guess that's what they call integrity.

Freedom vs. terror

-- by Dave


Be sure to check out my weekly Firedoglake post, "Civil Liberties and Terrorism", a discussion of Jane Harman's current anti-domestic-terrorism legislation:

As a journalist who has spent some time reporting on -- and in the process, studying -- domestic terrorism, I've been long dismayed by the Bush administration's political-marketing approach to terrorism, emphasizing the threat of foreign terrorists in the wake of 9/11 while displaying a distinct blindness to the ongoing threat from the domestic side.

So when I first heard about Rep. Jane Harman's "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" -- which looseheadprop has already discussed a bit -- I was intrigued. After all, a cursory glance at it indicated that it represented a reprioritization of our anti-terrorism policies to a more comprehensive strategy, one that's been lacking since George W. Bush's presidential tenure began.

But a closer look at the bill -- particularly the context in which it's arising, the elements pushing it forward, and the significant incursion on civil liberties for which it potentially opens the floodgates -- makes clear that, instead of offering effective tools to defeat terrorists, it's likely if anything to make matters worse. Certainly, it's nothing that serious progressives should support; the sooner it is shot down, the better.

I first heard about it a few weeks ago when I received an e-mail from Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, who was in the process of writing a story about it, inquiring if I'd heard of the legislation. At the time, I hadn't; and my initial response, based on a cursory examination, was that it looked, at least on the surface, like a potentially effective measure that would reorient our priorities on fighting terrorism.

Still, there were nagging issues, not the least of which was that the "national commission" that it would create would be exempt under the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which is designed to ensure transparency and openness to the public for its activities. Indeed, the more I looked, the more it became apparent the entity it would create would have little if any public accountability at all -- and would actually resemble some of the witch-hunt commissions that have haunted past episodes of American history.

But in-depth policy analysis is not my bailiwick, so I consulted people in the civil-rights business what their opinions were, and what I heard back was more than enough to raise real doubts in my mind about the legislation.

Unfortunately, it's eaten up all my blogging time today. Hope you find it worthy.

Civil Liberties and Terrorism

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
 

As a journalist who has spent some time reporting on — and in the process, studying — domestic terrorism, I’ve been long dismayed by the Bush administration’s political-marketing approach to terrorism, emphasizing the threat of foreign terrorists in the wake of 9/11 while displaying a distinct blindness to the ongoing threat from the domestic side.

So when I first heard about Rep. Jane Harman’s "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" — which looseheadprop has already discussed a bit — I was intrigued. After all, a cursory glance indicated that it represented a reprioritization of our anti-terrorism policies to a more comprehensive strategy, one that’s been lacking since George W. Bush’s presidential tenure began.

But a closer look at the bill — particularly the context in which it’s arising, the elements pushing it forward, and the significant incursion on civil liberties for which it potentially opens the floodgates — makes clear that, instead of offering effective tools to defeat terrorists, it’s likely if anything to make matters worse. Certainly, it’s nothing that serious progressives should support; the sooner it is shot down, the better.

I first heard about it a few weeks ago when I received an e-mail from Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, who was in the process of writing a story about it, inquiring if I’d heard of the legislation. At the time, I hadn’t; and my initial response, based on a cursory examination, was that it looked, at least on the surface, like a potentially effective measure that would reorient our priorities on fighting terrorism.

Still, there were nagging issues, not the least of which was that the "national commission" that it would create would be exempt under the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which is designed to ensure transparency and openness to the public for its activities. Indeed, the more I looked, the more it became apparent the entity it would create would have little if any public accountability at all — and would actually resemble some of the witch-hunt commissions that have haunted past episodes of American history.

But in-depth policy analysis is not my bailiwick, so I consulted people in the civil-rights business what their opinions were, and what I heard back was more than enough to raise real doubts in my mind about the legislation.

Lindsay’s In These Times piece directly touched on these issues. Notably, she obtained assessments from people who are invovled in both researching and organizing against domestic terrorists, particularly the far-right variety, many of whom I consider research colleagues. And the response was uniformly negative.

Mike German:

“A chief problem is radical forms of Islam, but we’re not only studying radical Islam,” Harman says. “We’re studying the phenomenon of people with radical beliefs who turn into people who would use violence.”

That worries Mike German, policy counsel for the ACLU, who calls the legislation “wrongheaded” because it focuses on ideology, rather than criminal activity. The bill calls for heightened scrutiny of people who believe, or might come to believe, in a violent ideology. German wants the government to focus on people who are actually committing crimes, rather than those who are merely entertaining violent ideas, something perfectly legal.

Chip Berlet:

“The bill replicates what already exists without peer review and safeguards,” says Chip Berlet, a senior policy analyst for Political Research Associates, an independent non-profit research organization that studies political violence, authoritarianism, and homegrown terrorism.

Devin Burghart:

The broad wording of the bill leaves open many questions. If homegrown terrorism is defined to include “intimidation” of the United States government or any segment of its population—could the Commission or the Center of Excellence task itself with investigating groups advocating boycotts, general strikes, or other forms of non-violent “intimidation”?

“While we wholeheartedly support efforts to curtail terrorism, primarily coming from white supremacists, we would also like to see legislation that more vigorously defends civil rights,” says Devin Burghart, an expert on domestic terrorism at the Center for New Communities, a national civil and human rights organization based in Chicago.

Let’s be clear: The problems that America faces regarding domestic terrorism have little if anything to do with the lack of tools for dealing with it. The tools exist already. The problems we have with domestic terrorism are all about the failure to use, or the misuse, of the tools we do have. The lack of adequate funding and staffing to deal with the issue reflects the larger skewing of national priorities by our governmental leaders — and that remains the problem.

As Beyerstein observes:

The FBI already has a domestic terrorism unit. The U.S. intelligence community also monitors the homegrown terrorists and overseas networks that might be reaching out to US residents. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate included a section headed, “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland.” But Harman argues that a national commission on homegrown terrorism could benefit the country in much the same way as the 9/11 Commission, the Silberman/Robb Commission or other high-profile national security inquiries.

Whatever the merits of a commission, they seem to be separate from the arguments for a center for excellence. After all, Congress can request testimony from the experts of its choice. There are other ways to fund research into domestic terrorism, including research grants awarded by peer review. One of the amendments to the bill emphasized the importance of international cooperation between U.S. authorities and experts in countries that have already contended with homegrown Islamic terrorist plots, but there is nothing stopping Congress from consulting with those experts now.

Berlet questions why the country needs the Secretary of Homeland Security to channel resources through a handpicked “center of excellence” when there are already so many scholars organizations studying political violence in America. He cited the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center as long-established, institutional sources of expertise on homegrown terrorism. Their efforts are complimented by independent scholars and writers across the country.
“Congress could just read their books,” he says.

German, who I first encountered when he was an undercover FBI agent, has a substantial track record of blowing the whistle on the FBI’s misbegotten handling of domestic terrorism under Bush. And as he points out, we quickly lost sight of the reality that terrorism is an asymmetrical threat, in spite of the fact that right on the heels of 9/11, the nation was gripped by the very real threat of an anthrax attack — which in the weeks, months and years since has been clearly shown to be an act of domestic terrorism. That incident made all too clear that these terrorists are prone to "piggybacking" off other domestic terrorists in hopes of creating a cresting tide of terror.

It became publicly obvious, though, that the administration’s antiterrorism strategy was nigh-useless with the FBI’s insistence that the most dangerous domestic-terrorist threat to Americans is actually the Earth Liberation Front. As I noted at the time:

This is a crystalline example of the gross skewing of priorities for both law enforcement and intelligence in dealing with terrorism that has been a hallmark of the Bush regime.

While eco-terrorists are a serious problem, and deserve certainly serious prosecution under the law, the level of threat they represent is proportionally so much less than that from the far-right "Patriot" movement and white supremacists as to raise serious questions about the priorities of both the FBI and the Justice Department. Certainly it is worth observing, as does It’s a Crock, that "eco-terrorist" Jeff Luers — who torched three SUVs and took care to do so when it was unlikely anyone would be harmed — is serving a 22-year prison sentence, while William Krar — who built a cyanide bomb designed to kill perhaps a hundred people or more — is facing a mere 15 years. When left-wing terrorists begin actually killing and maiming people and blowing up federal buildings with day cares inside them, or even plotting to do so, perhaps then they will deserve the kind of focus being accorded them under the Bush and Ashcroft style of governance.

Moreover, lest anyone think that the American far right is incapable of serious damage and not really in al Qaeda’s class, it’s probably useful to recall that before Sept. 11, the most lethal terrorist attack on American soil was committed by American right-wing extremists, with a toll similar to Spain’s recent losses.

And contrary to those who argue that an emphasis on law enforcement is inadequate, the reality is that a one-two punch of intelligence and law enforcement is extraordinarily effective in stopping terrorism, at least domestically. One of the points that emerged from my in-depth work for MSNBC on domestic terrorism was that of the 40-plus cases of serious domestic terrorism we identified as arising in the 1995-2000 period, the vast majority had in fact been nipped in the bud by law enforcement before the would-be terrorists could act, largely through effective intelligence-gathering and aggressive arrests and prosecution. There is no reason this same approach would not be effective on a global scale — unless, of course, one were allergic to cooperating with the very concept of international law enforcement.

Not only is the Bush administration allergic to international law enforcement, the officials in charge of its subsequent "war on terror" seem to break out in hives at the very concept of Americans’ civil liberties, since the majority of initiatives it’s undertaken since — data mining, wiretapping, and placing "enemy combatants" not under the purview of normal law enforcement but new "military tribunals" — have been all about destroying constitutional and legislative protections of those rights.

It’s a profoundly counter-productive approach, because defeating terrorism — really defeating it, which ultimately means preventing it — requires not the brute and violent excision of terrorists but the removal of the conditions (typically unaddressed grievances) that inspires people to such lengths in the first place. And the American system of government, predicated on a Constitution dedicated to the political empowerment of ordinary citizens, is in the end one of the most powerful tools for defusing this threat.

As German, in his excellent book Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent, puts it:

Luckily enough, the United States has the most practical counter-terrorism strategy ever written, and its record of effectiveness has lasted over 200 years. All we have to do now is take it off the shelf where it has been languishing since 9/11 and implement it. The counterterrorism strategy I’m referring to is called the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution is a workable counterterrorism strategy because its authors were themselves terrorists — or freedom fighters, if you prefer — fresh from a successful asymmetrical war of attrition waged against the superpower of their day. The colonists knew what compelled them to fight and what enabled them to succeed. When they sat down to create their new government, they wanted to inoculate it against the abuses of power that drove their just rebellion. …

German cites the values expressed by Jefferson in his inaugural address:

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people — a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.

As German says:

A nation guided by these principles could not produce a legitimately motivated terrorist group, especially the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments guaranteed these rights to all men and women. And while extremist terrorist groups can rise from time to time to threaten the peace, the efficient enforcement of the law through the strict observance of constitutional rights ensures these groups will not grow into a movement that can threaten national security.

Unfortunately, the decision makers who set U.S. counterterrorism policies somehow got the idea the Constitution was an impediment to counterterrorism operations rather than an effective strategy to fight terrorism. They said the Bill of Rights unnecessarily handcuffed our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and they could only effectively counter terrorism if they were freed from constitutional restraints. Further, the al Qaeda threat was so new and so grave it was beyond the capacity of traditional legal solutions. They even rendered the Geneva Conventions "quaint" in this new type of war.

They told the American people and their allies we needed to go on the "dark side" if we wanted to fight this threat and win. Even worse, since the Global War on Terrorism began they have led us to believe our own rights threaten our survival. They have lured us into the false belief that we can only ensure our security by sacrificing our civil liberties.

These reactions are not unusual in times of crisis, as we’ve seen, nor is the United States alone in making the mistake of believing security can be maintained only by restraining liberty. It seems every generation faces threats it then uses to justify extraordinary actions. …

Over 200 years later the Constitution still protects us, and ours is still the strongest government on earth. Liberty is now a weakness, it is our strength. …

As we learned from reading the various terrorists’ strategies, they use tactics specifically designed to provoke an inefficient response. Terrorists want the victimized government to blame an entire community for the acts of a few and punish the innocent as well as the guilty. An effective counterterrorism strategy, then, requires efficiency, both in using allocated resources wisely and in focusing the counterterrorism strategy squarely on the terrorists. The Constitution is the perfect counterterrorism strategy because it is designed to compel efficiency in the way government power is exercised.

People involved in the work of monitoring domestic terrorists, hate groups, and other far-right extremists are motivated primarily by concern for the fundamental civil rights of our fellow citizens. After all, what these groups are about primarily is the extra-governmental denial of the civil rights of minorities and other target groups.

We’ll never defeat them by taking away their civil rights. What will work, in fact, is emphasizing our liberties and ensuring that they are protected from abuse both by the government and by their fellow citizens.

In that respect, passing a federal bias-crimes law will do more to protect Americans from acts of terrorism than creating an unaccountable national commission ever will, since it would seriously enhance the law-enforcement tools we already have. Jane Harman and the rest of the Democratic leadership recently had their chance to do something about that — and, well, we all know how that turned out, don’t we?

The Huckster

[New York Times photo]

-- by Dave

It's kind of funny how, in the world of Republican wingnuttia, being taken seriously can turn you into a real nutcase.

Take Mike Huckabee. Back before he started climbing in the GOP presidential polls, he was inclined to say reasonable things about immigration, things that were almost kind of human-sounding, such as: "Unfortunately, instead of being angry at the federal government for totally failing us [on immigration policy], [people] sometimes get angry at [immigrants] themselves." It was enough that the nativist wing of the party decided to declare him a "disaster" on the issue.

So to head them off at the pass, as it were, as he gained in the polls, pretty soon he was joining the rest of the Republican field in immigrant-bashing, even going so far as to issue an immigration plan calling for the deportation of all 12 million illegal immigrants within 120 days. That and his altered rhetoric were enough to win him the support of Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist -- who is a special kind of right-wing nutcase himself, most recently promoting conspiracy theories about a looming "North American Union".

Of course, if this were a Democrat engaged in such a wholesale "repositioning," the term "flip-flop" would be on all the cable-network tongues. Ah, but the Village idiots Heart Huckabee, building up his image as a likeable fellow while ignoring a host of questions about his record as Arkansas governor.

And what that record suggests, of course, is that this rightward shift on immigration was inevitable for Huckabee, given his own pedigree in xenophobic wingnuttia. As Bloggernista notes, he's been especially toxic in his dealings with Teh Gay:

In a 1992 senate race Huckabee when asked about allowing openly gay Americans to serve in the military said:

I believe to try to legitimize that which is inherently illegitimate would be a disgraceful act of government. I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.

Wow Mike! Tell us how much you really hate The Gays.

This revelation comes on the heels of Huckabee defending his statement about quarantining people living with HIV, Huckabee saying homosexuality is a sin and saying that gay marriage is a threat to civilization.

Huckabee's animus toward gays is of course a product of his fundamentalist religiosity, which has played a major role in his climb in the GOP polls. When he was in Seattle recently, he sought and won the endorsements of a group of fundamentalist pastors here:

Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, was endorsed by Joseph Fuiten, pastor of Cedar Park Church in Bothell, and 29 other evangelical-faith community leaders from the area.

"The governor represents our values," Fuiten said after a small fundraising luncheon at the Harbor Club in Bellevue. "I like that he believes, and I like what he believes. His Christianity is organic; he has been this way all his life."

You may remember Pastor Fuiten. He was the fellow who, a few months back, announced that under Christian rule, non-Christians would be considered "illegal aliens."

More to the point, he's also one of the leading regional figures in anti-gay politics, culminating in his leadership role with the virulently (and violently) antigay organization Watchmen on the Walls. At their recent gathering in Lynnwood, he opened the proceedings by making a speech that mostly blamed the media for publicizing the group's background. But Fuiten at the same time indicated that he subscribes to the revisionist theory that gays were secretly behind the Holocaust (a popular item among the Watchmen).

This is the electoral ground that Mike Huckabee is now staking out. And the more successful he becomes, the farther right he seems to be heading. By the time he manages to ascend to the nomination (should he make it that far), we might start hearing more about that proposal to quarantine gays. It would fit in with his plan to eliminate 12 million immigrants from our shores.

But, you know, if he says it with a grin and a strum of the guitar, I'm sure the Village will be buying. It wouldn't have been the first time they've been suckers for right-wing opportunists with a Southern twang.

Reconquista reconsidered

[The nativist nightmare: "Borders? We don't need no steenking borders!"]

-- by Dave

We've had a little fun here in the past making fun of the wingnuts (like Michelle Malkin) who have ardently adopted the "Reconquista!" conspiracy theory.

But Alisa Valdez-Rodriguez has a thought-provoking post up about the continuing currency of the theory, and makes an important point:

45 million Mexicans live in extreme poverty in Mexico. According to Duke University professor David Brady, at least 46 million Americans now live in extreme poverty. We are technically the richest country in the world, yet we have the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation, and by far the most poor people. Our poverty rate is double that of Canada and the UK and triple that of the rest of Europe. It's like the caller on the Randi Rhodes show said, "You have seven unemployed guys in a bar, Bill Gates walks in, and on average, everyone's a billionaire."

Yep. It’s a fact. When it comes to income distribution and poverty, we’re being Mexicanized. But it’s not because of the Mexicans. It’s because of the neocons, their disgusting monopolies, corporate greed and political corruption.

I wouldn't characterize this as a product of the "neocons" per se, except to the extent that they are part of the larger conservative movement, which encompasses the nativists who are the chief progenitors of the wedge politics that enable this paradigm.

Nonetheless, her larger point is an important one -- namely, that Republican and generally pro-corporatist policies throughout government have had the long-term effect of creating what my late mentor, Sen. Frank Church, used to call the "Latin Americanization of America":

One comment in particular, however, stands out in my mind these days. We were talking about America's future, and where the conservative cadre that was then taking over the Republican Party intended to take us. His expression darkened, and it was clear that he had a good deal of foreboding in this regard. "What I fear most," he said, "is the Latin Americanization of America."

He wasn't concerned, of course, with the arrival of Latinos on American soil (or what Pat Buchanan calls "Meximerica") except insofar as that could be manipulated to achieve this end. What he feared was that corporatist conservatives, if given free rein, would turn our standard of living into what you find in Latin America. That working Americans would one day be reduced to the level of near-serfdom that is the common way of life for millions of Latinos.

Indeed, this is the underlying dynamic driving much of the current immigration debate. Nativists so far have had a field day whipping up hysteria about invading Latinos, which lets conservatives evade the hard issues about the role of immigration in a growing economy.

By making Latinos into scapegoats, the American right has managed to obscure the culpability of the "magic of the marketplace" in creating the demand for illegal labor -- and obscures the reality that keeping them illegal ensures the corporations who benefit a captive labor force. Of course, creating a path to citizenship for these immigrants would immediately undercut, if not demolish, this dynamic -- so it's important to keep whipping up fears about white privilege as a way of preventing from even considering such a route.

In the process, of course, the all-important discussion we need to be having -- one in which we start emphasizing American values and what it means to be American, which really is the essence of our nation's great immigration tradition -- is lost altogether.

Character will out

-- by Dave

We've known for a long time that the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- a favorite "think tank" for right-wing nativists, who find their endless churn of often dubious statistics grist for their own anti-immigrant mills (Lou Dobbs in particular has a penchant for citing them) -- has a background that is, to put it kindly, a bit sketchy.

It is, after all, a leading component in the organizational network of "academic" nativists cobbled together by the white eugenicist John Tanton, exposed five years ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite its pedigree, it's always managed to avoid being designated a bona-fide "hate group," in large part because such a designation typically goes to groups that devote their energies to the xenophobic denigration of target groups. FAIR, with its focus on "statistical studies" (such as they are), has typically managed to eschew such rhetoric -- though the frequently inflammatory twist it gave to its studies meant that often danced at the edge.

Today the SPLC announced that it was finally designating FAIR a "hate group", due to a recent ratcheting rightward of its rhetoric and its activities, far enough that it was clear the mask was coming off:

At the center of the Tanton web is the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important organization fueling the backlash against immigration. Founded by Tanton in 1979, FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico's secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. Just last February, FAIR President Dan Stein sought "advice" from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.

As Mark Potok explained it at the Hatewatch blog:

Much of this has been known for years. But last February, underlining the way that FAIR does business, its leaders met with the leaders of Vlaams Belang — a hastily renamed Belgian party that under a prior appellation, Vlaams Blok, was officially banned by the Belgian Supreme Court as a racist and xenophobic group. It was, for some, a final straw — the Rubicon of hate, as it were. When FAIR officials met with Vlaams Belang leaders to seek their “advice” on immigration, we decided to take another look at FAIR. When our work was done, it was obvious that FAIR qualified as a hate group. Early next year, when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual hate group list is published, FAIR will be on the list.

The contacts with Vlaams Belang reflect part of a larger trend of the internationalization of white nationalism, including recent electoral gains for white supremacist factions in Germany, and the export of far-right gay-bashing radicals from Eastern Europe to America in the form of the Watchmen on the Walls. You may also recall Vlaams Belang as the recent implosion in the wingnutosphere over the group's American outreach efforts -- reported in some glorious detail on the pages of another SPLC-designated hate group, VDare.

Funny how that works.

Feeling the thuggery

-- by Dave

David Love at In These Times has a followup to the recent SPLC report on "noose incidents" as an indicator of a growing white backlash against minorities, and concludes:

But why are these racially motivated crimes on the rise at this point in time? Potok suggests that the recent noose incidents reflect not a fringe phenomenon, but a major social problem. "We're looking at an upsurge in racial nationalism," says Potok. "What's going on is a serious backlash against globalization. You have a certain level of economic rage that provides fertile ground for these groups." He says that with more people of color immigrating to the country, "whites are angry and uneasy."

According to Potok, these whites who are scapegoating think, "Our country is being stolen from us. The country my white Christian forefathers built is being taken away." But on Democracy Now!, Malik Shabazz, a member of Black Lawyers for Justice, said: "The hanging of nooses is a sign that there [could] be real bodies under those nooses very soon."

The manifestation of this backlash, however, goes well beyond simply the noose incidents, and the targets are broader than merely minorities. As a product of the right's ongoing "culture war," the animus is being more generally directed toward those who are blamed for threatening white privilege: liberals, mulitculturalists, antiwar peace advocates, gays and lesbians, and what Bill O'Reilly calls "secular progressives," in addition to the obvious and usual targets -- blacks and other racial minorities, as well as such religious/ethnic minorities as Jews and Muslims.

I've been documenting this growing eliminationism for some time now, observing that for the most part it has been confined to poisonous rhetoric.

But I've also observed that this kind of rhetoric has a history in America and elsewhere of being an important predicate of actual eliminationist violence, serving as a form of social permission that actually encourages such acts.

You can see this danger clearly in such incidents as that reported recently by Pam Spaulding:

Openly gay Chapel Hill (NC) Town Councilman Mark Kleinschmidt (who I recently met up with at the G&L; Leadership Conference last weekend) is the target of a bunch of online neo-Nazi thugs who have compiled a list of out gay elected officials, or as one put it, "List of Open and Unapologetic Faggot Politicians." Mark:

Over the last 3 days I've seen at least three sites re-post the same list of gay officials from around the country. The post is a reprint of a list of openly gay elected officials maintained by Actwin, an lgbt activist who monitored the voting records of gay elected officials.

The most disturbing element? This repeated statement:

Because the information is perishable, local activists are best advised to use this information first as a precursor for additional investigation before taking "direct action".

Pam goes on to then detail some of the hateful comments that have come pouring in to Mark's site, including the following warning:

White America is waking up.

Attention sub-humans: Something wicked this way comes.

This kind of generalized hatefulness is not merely confined to neo-Nazis and fringe thugs; rather, but it's being expressed so broadly and at so many levels -- from major right-wing media figures to Republican presidential candidates to the far reaches of the right-wing assholosphere -- that of course, it's also being internalized, and indeed normalized, by the general populace.

That this is occurring on a broad scale is indicated by the fact that it's even turning up among impressionable high-schoolers, such as the students in Maryland who advocated banning a course in "peace studies" because it was too "liberal." A couple of weeks ago, Crooks and Liars pointed out a story out of Florida in which such liberal activism actually produced an outpouring of thuggish intimidation from right-wing students waving the banner of the Confederate flag. It started out with the standard organization of an anti-war "peace" group among a small cluster of students:

But what started out as a light-hearted gesture soon started to be taken out of context.

Students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them, said Lauren.

"People just turned on us like that," she said. "At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn't even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made."

The heckling began early in the school year, according to group members. They said they were putting small posters promoting peace on friends' lockers with their permission.

They thought it was OK, because the cheerleaders and football players had signs on theirs. Eventually, though, group members said they were told by the school's administration they could no longer hang up the posters.

"People tore them down and drew swastikas and 'white power' stuff on them," Lauren said.

Skylar had similar things written on her posters.

"Someone taped an 'I Love Bush' sign over my 'Wage Peace' sign," she said. "So I tore it down, threw it away, and the whole commons starting booing. I walk by later and find that someone has completely tore my sign down and placed an 'I Love America, Because America Loves War' sign up."

That was when the Dixie flags began showing up, along with the "love it or leave it" talk:

Soon, a second group started to wear Confederate flag shirts to oppose the peace group, Skylar said. She saw shirts with sayings such as "This is America, get used to it," and "If peace is the answer; it must be a stupid question."

"Now there are even 'support our troops' kids who don't like us because I guess they think you can't say peace and support the troops at the same time," Lauren said.

Skylar later passed out yellow ribbons for her group to wear to show they support the troops as well as peace.

However, Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. High sophomores Lydia Pace and Joseph Marianetti said the Confederate shirts they wear express support for the troops in Iraq, and nothing more. Joseph said the shirts have nothing to do with racism.

"Someone took something that stood for peace and twisted it" in regards to the swastikas (drawn by a third group) and the Confederate flag, he said.

As Newhoggers points out, the most disturbing element has been the school's response -- which has de facto condoned the thuggery:

The school responded by punishing the peace kids for causing trouble and denied them the right to have a peace club even though they submitted a written proposal and had a sponsor as required. Now all they have left is a My Space page where their detractors continue to leave threatening comments.

There's something truly rotten in the Denmark of the right. Every day, it seems, it comes floating up to the surface in some form. But we're reaching a dangerous pass when local civic authorities start to give it their tacit support.

Enough with the baby drowning

-- by Dave

My latest post at The Big Con is up. It's a discussion of the effort to end the Bush administration's corporate scam on public lands, the "RAT tax", it's titled "The Phonies in the Woods":

It's a sure indicator that all-out rot has begun to sink into conservatism as a governing philosophy when even people in the red states that normally constitute the right's electoral base begin to figure that there's something wrong here.

The point no doubt came home for many of them the past three years when they decided to go fishing or camping somewhere and found that they were being expected to fork over even more money at the trailhead -- with the money actually going toward the private development of business on those lands.

Last week, Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, introduced legislation that would bring an end to the Bush administration's scheme to make the public pay twice for using public lands, all to the benefit of the resource-extraction industry.

Hope you enjoy. Will have a regular post up later today here.

Did someone say ... Satan?

-- by Dave

I had just finished reading Tom Tomorrow's thorough takedown of Bill O'Reilly when I came across this:

On Fox News yesterday, Bill O’Reilly let loose on “far-left websites” like DailyKos, stating, “If you read these far-left websites, you’re a devil worshipper. You are.” O’Reilly’s ombudsman responded, “As a journalist, you know better than that.” O’Reilly shot back: “Satan is running the DailyKos. Yes, he is!”

Satire is now not just dead -- its corpse is being danced about on a stick.

I'm sure someone should tell O'Reilly to get a grip, but I'm not sure we'd want to see how he might choose to act on that.

Journalism's accountability problem

-- by Dave

The Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, could be found whining in her column today about the meanies who seem to be upset about the paper's misreportage of rumors surrounding Barack Obama's Muslim background:

Hamilton said, "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."

This is the new world mainstream journalists live in, one that will continue to be explored in this column.

What people like Howell, and Hamilton, and a whole horde of their mainstream-media cohorts, just don't seem to get is that this "new world" is a world they made.

The profession of journalism has a real problem: at its highest and most powerful levels, its practitioners have become immune to anything resembling real accountability -- and their abuses are piling up because of it. Abuses are nothing new, but neither is some modicum of accountability; yet nowadays, when they happen at powerhouses like the Washington Post and the New York Times and CNN, no one is held accountable.

They keep running the same congenitablly wrong pundits, keep churning out the same Village mentality reporting, and most of all, they keep pretending that their bad, misleading, and false reportage really is nothing important. Sure they make a few mistakes, but hey, they're just trying to do their job -- because, after all, facts are just a matter of opinion, right?

Their consumers have just about had enough of it. Obviously, the perpetrators never like being called out, but if they're looking for someone to blame, the mirror is a good place to start.

Glenn Greenwald and a host of others have recently been assiduously documenting the grotesque journalistic malfeasance of Joe Klein, but even more importantly, that of Time magazine and its editors, in its handling of Klein's misreportage on FISA, which he mistook for an avenue to a cheap shot at Democrats.

But almost as egregious -- perhaps more so, considering his reach -- have been the antics of CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has been piling up a record of parroting far-right propaganda in the immigration debate, and then has been furiously evading any responsibility for doing so.

So let's use Lou Dobbs to see if we can explain to the Deborah Howells of the business why people are becoming so fucking pissed off -- enough, hey, to even swear a little. Dobbs, of course, doesn't work for the Post, but he's an icon of the "mainstream media" world that has Howell wringing her hands.

Earlier this week, Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! tried once again to hold Dobbs' feet to the fire, and he spent the better part of an hour dancing around instead.

Fairly typical was this exchange:

AMY GOODMAN: So, Lou, you said a third of the prison population are illegal aliens.

LOU DOBBS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: The fact is, it’s something like 6% of prisoners in this country are non-citizens, not even illegal, just non-citizens.

LOU DOBBS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And then a percentage of that would not be documented.

LOU DOBBS: Well, it’s actually—I think it’s 26% in federal prison.

AMY GOODMAN: But you said of all prisoners.

LOU DOBBS: I said about—yes, but I—and I misspoke, without question. I was referring to federal prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: But you didn’t say that, and so it leaves people with the impression—

LOU DOBBS: Well, I didn’t, but then I just explained it to you.

AMY GOODMAN: But you have a very large audience on CNN.

LOU DOBBS: I have a very large audience and a very bright audience.

AMY GOODMAN: And you told them that a third of the population of this country are illegal immigrants. 6% , which is under the population of immigrants—

LOU DOBBS: 6% , right.

AMY GOODMAN: —in this country, of prisoners—

LOU DOBBS: In state prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: —are immigrants.

LOU DOBBS: In state prisons. In state prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: No, 6% overall are immigrants. You said 30% are illegal.

LOU DOBBS: Well, I think we’ve established—we could sit here and say this all day, Amy. The fact is, the number is 26% in federal prisons. That’s what I was referring to. I did not—I misspoke when I said “prisons.” I was referring to the federal prisons, because that’s the federal crime: immigration. And that—

AMY GOODMAN: Have you made a correction on your show to say that 30% of—?

LOU DOBBS: I’m sure we have. We’ve reported—absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: We didn’t see it.

LOU DOBBS: Do you know how many reports we’ve done on illegal immigration in this country?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, many.

LOU DOBBS: I mean, my god.

In point of fact, there simply is no record of Dobb having corrected the mistaken report on the air.

And Dobbs continuously claims in other cases that he also has issued corrections when, in fact, he has not:

LOU DOBBS: What would you have me say, Amy? Because what—the reality is what you don’t say, is that Leonhardt’s piece was filled with errors. Secondly, Madeleine Cosman, as we learned following that report in Physicians and Surgeons, the publication, is precisely what you styled her: she is a wack—or was a wackjob. But the New York Times didn’t know that, either. If you would read the obituary for Madeleine Cosman in the New York Times—have you done that, by the way? She died a year ago, which was, by the way, a year after we had used her as a source in a report, along with other people. Did you read that obituary? Did you find that the New York Times had come to basically the same conclusion we had, that she was a credible source? Because if you read that obituary, it is glowing and filled with plaudits for Madeleine Cosman. And so—

... LOU DOBBS: How in the world can you use my name and “anti-immigrant” in the same breath?

AMY GOODMAN: When we hear comments like—

LOU DOBBS: You hear—

AMY GOODMAN: —a third of the—from you—we’ve played them, so we can’t refute the videotape, Lou.

LOU DOBBS: Have you looked, Amy—

AMY GOODMAN: We can’t refute—a third of prisoners are—

LOU DOBBS: Yes. And we discussed that?

AMY GOODMAN: —are illegal immigrants—

LOU DOBBS: Have we discussed it?

AMY GOODMAN: No, a third of prisoners are illegal immigrants, not true. 7,000 leprosy cases in the last three years because of illegal immigrants—

LOU DOBBS: Christine Romans misspoke—

AMY GOODMAN: —not true.

LOU DOBBS: -- We said that. And that’s as straightforward as we can put it.

AMY GOODMAN: And you made an announcement on your show—

LOU DOBBS: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: —and you will say it here—

LOU DOBBS: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: —that it is not true. Illegal immigrants are not responsible for 7,000 cases of leprosy over last three years.

LOU DOBBS: Not over the last three years. But the likelihood is that illegal immigrants are responsible, because they are the ones who brought Hansen’s disease—

AMY GOODMAN: ”The likelihood”—based on what, Lou?

LOU DOBBS: Based on doctors at the Hansen Center,—

AMY GOODMAN: No.

LOU DOBBS: —who said that—listen to me. Hansen’s—I mean, if you guys—you guys are just ridiculous in your loss of proportion here. You’re talking about one report. But if you want to talk about it, tuberculosis and Hansen’s disease are both screened, and they are so similar in the symptoms and their presentation that doctors look for that in the screening. Without question.

AMY GOODMAN: But as you agree now, you’re formally apologizing for having a presentation on your show—

LOU DOBBS: I already have.

Well, he sort of did, though it was the damnedest "clarification" I've ever seen -- one in which, while admitting that Cosman's material was spurious, he not only made himself out to be a victim, but he falsely claimed that it had only been reported as credible one time, two years previously, when in fact he and Romans had defended the reportage only three weeks previously. Here's what he said:

Today's New York Times column is primarily a personal attack on me, focuses on an ad-lib on the set of this broadcast uttered more than two years ago by Christine Romans on a number of cases of leprosy in this country. An unscripted ad-lib, not a report by the way -- we've never done a report on leprosy until we had to set this record straight a couple of weeks ago. That's over four and a half years of reporting on that issue.

As I noted at the time:

Actually, Dobbs reasserted the false statistics as "factual" as recently as three weeks ago. And nowhere in this entire diatribe does Dobbs clear the air and explain to his audience that the leprosy statistics he cited -- 7,000 cases -- referred to a thirty-year period, not a three-year period. He claims that a separate report did so, but if it did, it was (a) buried, and (b) completely inadequate as a correction.

Dobbs goes on to actually confess that he was wrong to use Madeleine Cosman as a source:

That columnist also said I gave air time to white supremacists, and mentions one by name, Madeleine Cosman, who wrote the article that Christine Romans used as a source for her later leprosy statement.

The fact is, I made a mistake, and I've said we would never have used her as a source if we had known of her controversial background two years ago, at the time of the offending ad-lib. But the columnist fails to note that his own paper wrote a glowing obituary of Madeleine Cosman when she died last year.

Oh, really? When he did he say this?

Because just last May 7, 2007, this was what Dobbs and Romans said:

DOBBS: And there was a question about some of your comments, Christine. Following one of your reports, I told Leslie Stahl, "We don't make up numbers." And I will tell everybody here again tonight, I stand 100 percent behind what you said.

ROMANS: That's right, Lou. We don't make up numbers here. This is what we reported.

We reported: "It's interesting, because the woman in our piece told us that there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years. Leprosy in this country."

I was quoting Dr. Madeleine Cosman, a respected medical lawyer and medical historian. Writing in The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, she said: "Hansen's disease" -- that's the other modern name, I guess, for leprosy -- "Hansen's disease was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy" -- Lou.

DOBBS: It's remarkable that this -- whatever, confusion or confoundment over 7,000 cases. They actually keep a registry of cases of leprosy. And the fact that it rose was because of -- one assumes because we don't know for sure -- but two basic influences: unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country primarily from South Asia, and the -- secondly, far better reporting.

ROMANS: That's what Dr. Cosman told us, Lou.

Goodman and Gonzalez also tried, without any more success, to pin Dobbs down on his outrageous use of a graphic taken from the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens in a report warning the public about the looming invasion of illegal aliens and their intent to found an "Aztlan" in the Southwest:

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Southern Poverty Law Center criticized CNN for airing that report, in part because, as your reporter Casey Wian spoke, a graphic appeared on the screen. It was a map of the United States highlighting the seven Southwestern states that Mexico supposedly covets and calls Aztlan. The map was prominently sourced to the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is considered by many to be a white supremacist hate group.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Lou Dobbs?

LOU DOBBS: You know the response, and you know the reality. That—how long was that screen up? How long was that map up?

AMY GOODMAN: Enough to see it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: A few seconds.

LOU DOBBS: The field producer who—did you know it was from the CCC? Which is a hate group.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s attributed right there. It says Council of Conservative Citizens.

LOU DOBBS: Right. And it couldn’t be clearer, could it? I mean, we weren’t hiding anything. We had no idea what they were. The field producer who used it went on the web, pulled—did a “grab,” as it’s called, and put it up. And she was suspended for a day for doing so.

Did you guys know that we have sent our producers and our reporters down to the Southern Poverty Law Center years ago to make certain this sort of thing doesn’t happen? That’s how seriously we take the issue. And for you to talk about the incursion, you forgot to point out that that was coming out of rather jocular discussion of the incursions by Mexican forces along the border and the response of the US government.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But—

LOU DOBBS: And, I mean, are you offended?

AMY GOODMAN: Lou, did you say you have no idea what the Council of Conservative Citizens is?

LOU DOBBS: Did I say I don’t?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

LOU DOBBS: I certainly do now. Absolutely. What did I—you didn’t hear what I just said?

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to—

LOU DOBBS: They’re acknowledged as a hate group. Absolutely.

JUAN GONZALEZ: See, but the problem, this—

LOU DOBBS: What is the problem here?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Projecting the image to your viewers that there’s a Mexican desire to reconquer, the Reconquista of the Southwestern United States, does create images—and especially in people who are not necessarily as intelligent as you necessarily or who have studied as much as you have—

LOU DOBBS: Thank you for conceding that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —that the country is under siege.

LOU DOBBS: My god, are you so self-important that you don’t think people have a sense of humor when Casey Wian says this is an authorized incursion by the Mexican government? You don’t think people have a sense of humor about that? The reality is, I think most people do. The other thing is, who are you trying to protect America from? I’m a little confused, because the reality is that there is a strong radical group of Reconquistas and Aztlan aficionados, and I have had them demonstrating against me in a couple of cities over the past few weeks. Don’t sit here being disingenuous—

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m not.

LOU DOBBS: —and sanctimonious, because, let me tell you something—

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m not being disingenuous.

LOU DOBBS: —there are many idiots on either extreme of this debate, and don’t kid yourself—

AMY GOODMAN: But, Lou, I think what’s important here—

LOU DOBBS: —and you know it.

AMY GOODMAN: —once again, is the pattern. It’s the pattern—

LOU DOBBS: The pattern—come on, please.

AMY GOODMAN: No, let me make my point, because what I talk about is facts.

LOU DOBBS: OK, let’s look at the pattern. The pattern is, for five years, we’ve been reporting on illegal immigration. The pattern is that we have been reporting on the impact of illegal immigration. It doesn’t suit your partisan views—and that’s understandable—or your ideological views. But don’t get carried away with yourselves, for crying out loud!

Poor Lou -- it's really all about him, isn't it? It's about trying to tear him down, not about the fact that his bad reportage -- which have the obvious effect of reinforcing racist stereotypes of immigrants as disease-ridden criminals intent on invading our fair land and taking it over -- is helping to foment a violent backlash against Latino immigrants.

Nevermind that the bad CofCC information about "Aztlan" actually formed the basis for the whole report -- and Dobbs never has made that clear to his audience, nor has he ever backed off on the misbegotten "Aztlan" reportage in general. As Alex Koppelman observed:

CNN is trying to play this off as an isolated mistake. Don't be fooled: it's not. The fact that Dobbs and reporter Casey Wian showed the CCC map only makes the subtle pattern of racist fantasies given voice on Dobbs' show more visible. (By the way, relatively unnoticed -- the same night Dobbs was citing the CCC, he was leaving unchallenged, even laughing along with, one guest's suggestion that in order to get rid of illegal Mexican immigrants New Yorkers should order pizza and then arrest the delivery person. Thanks, Lou. We'll get right on that.) For months now, Dobbs and Wian have been reporting on "reconquista" and "Aztlan" movements, movements that exist not in the minds of mainstream Mexicans but in the fever dreams of white supremacists. That Dobbs eventually aired material pulled directly from a white supremacist organization should surprise no one -- when you're subtly citing them on a regular basis, the unfiltered truth is bound to bubble up at some point.

Goodman's column discussing the Dobbs interview makes clear how frustrating it is to watch a fellow journalist -- one who you shouldn't have to explain fundamental journalistic ethics to -- dance and evade their responsibility for a long trail of misreportage, nearly all of which has served to demonizde and denigrate the presence of Latino Americans.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating:

Mainstream journalists like to complain that bloggers frequently promulgate bad information and then fail to own up to it when exposed. It's one of the reasons that blogs are supposedly unreliable sources of information.

But they really haven't a lot of room to make this accusation as long as they continue to ignore the continuing antics of Lou Dobbs, who as Media Matters observes, still hasn't corrected his nakedly false reportage on the rates of leprosy infection associated with illegal immigration. Indeed, he's been dodging the issue by claiming that his figures were correct all along.

... As a longtime working journalist, this utter lack of accountability among powerful figures in the mainstream media -- a trend dating back to the 1990s, when the New York Times itself was able to simply ignore the damning exposure of Jeff Gerth's shoddy Whitewater reportage by Gene Lyons in Fools for Scandal -- is both infuriating and disheartening, because it does in fact damage the credibility of us all. It is the primary reason, I believe, for the existence of the blogosphere, particularly the media critique that has existed on the left side of the aisle.

Dobbs' record has been fully exposed for some time now. You'd think that, by now, he would have begun to suffer some serious professional consequences for his abrogation of basic standards and his refusal to be accountable for them.

But, ah, not so much. This week it was announced that Dobbs is getting a daily radio show.

This is the new world the consumers of mainstream media news now live in. Wonder if Howell will explore that in her column.

UPDATE: Should have figured that Digby would also catch this.

'Faltering at the Crossroads'

-- by Dave

I have some further commentary on the demise of the federal hate-crimes bill up at my weekly slot at Firedoglake:

'In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.' -- Martin Luther King

Nancy Pelosi's pretty words about "an opportunity to end discrimination and the violence that goes with it" ring pretty hollow this week, with word emerging from Capitol Hill that House Democrats are in the process of crumbling on passage of the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

And while plenty of the blame for this massive failure will undoubtedly (and deservedly) rest on the increasingly common object of progressive despair -- namely, spineless congressional Democrats -- there in reality is more than enough culpability to go around. The failure, once again, to pass a federal hate-crimes law also reflects on the state of progressive politics generally, especially the balkanization of progressives into discrete interest groups who rarely cross lines to support one another.

Let's face it: This legislation was tagged as a "gay issue" -- mainly because the opposition to it arose almost wholly from the inclusion of sexual preference as a category of bias, fueled by the homophobes of the religious right. And gay-rights groups were certainly in the forefront of pushing the bill. However, other progressives, including those directly affected by hate crimes, neglected to join in the fight to any notable extent. Where were the civil-rights groups, the immigrant-rights groups, the labor unions?

Hope you find it worthy.

Incidentally, Pelosi issued a statement this afternoon:

"I am strongly committed to sending the hate crimes legislation, passed by the House earlier this year, to the President for his signature. Democrats have worked exhaustively with advocacy groups and polled Members repeatedly, but it is clear that attaching the language to the DoD authorization bill would not create a successful outcome in the House.

"House Democratic leaders will work with our Senate colleagues to make certain that a hate crimes bill passes the Senate and goes to the President's desk."

Well, we've certainly heard this before. I suspect we'll hear it again.

Faltering at the Crossroads

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. — Martin Luther King

Nancy Pelosi’s pretty words about "an opportunity to end discrimination and the violence that goes with it" ring pretty hollow this week, with word emerging from Capitol Hill that House Democrats are in the process of crumbling on passage of the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

And while plenty of the blame for this massive failure will undoubtedly (and deservedly) rest on the increasingly common object of progressive despair — namely, spineless congressional Democrats — there in reality is more than enough culpability to go around. The failure, once again, to pass a federal hate-crimes law also reflects on the state of progressive politics generally, especially the balkanization of progressives into discrete interest groups who rarely cross lines to support one another.

Let’s face it: This legislation was tagged as a "gay issue" — mainly because the opposition to it arose almost wholly from the inclusion of sexual preference as a category of bias, fueled by the homophobes of the religious right. And gay-rights groups were certainly in the forefront of pushing the bill. However, other progressives, including those directly affected by hate crimes, neglected to join in the fight to any notable extent. Where were the civil-rights groups, the immigrant-rights groups, the labor unions?

How was it possible, for instance, for thousands of African Americans to march on the Justice Department and demand hate-crimes enforcement, as they did last month, and have no one mention the pending hate-crimes law?

After all, the bill specifically addresses the very issue that lies at the heart of the "Jena 6" controversy — namely, the failures of law enforcement to adequately enforce these laws. The legislation, as I’ve noted previously, is carefully written to emphasize helping local law enforcement do its job — provide training, help identify bias crimes, provide funds for strapped prosecutors — and it specifically defers to local jurisdictions. At the same time it makes it possible for federal authorities to move in when local law enforcement fails to do so, particularly in any of the seven states that have no bias-crime law.

Similarly, it’s been hard to find much in the way of serious support for the Shepard bill from Latinos and immigrant-rights organizations. There have been exceptions: The Latino Coalition made an effort to support the bill, and Latino bloggers like Xicanopwr chimed in as well. Nonetheless, the support was surprisingly muted and not particularly broad, in spite of the fact that Latino immigrants have been among the chief victims of the recent spike in hate-crimes nationally reported by the FBI.

This reflects, I think, the way progressives in general have managed to balkanize themselves in general. We get behind our particular interests and scarcely look over the fences we’ve erected. The civil-rights arena is only one in which this happens: gay rights, civil-rights, and immigrant-rights groups all have common ground that they could and should occupy jointly, but too often don’t. It happens elsewhere, too: antiwar organizations are slow to link up to civil libertarians who are trying to tackle the Bush administration’s abusive power grabs. Environmental groups are slow to recognize that the religious-right extremists who form the footsoldiers of the corporate right’s anti-green backlash are the same frothing wingnuts who are attacking gays and lesbians. And gay-rights organizations manage to similarly focus on "their" issues without realizing that, for instance, they ought to pay attention to the Bush administration’s trampling of civil liberties, because those have a profound long-term impact for their interests as well.

I think this balkanization has a lot to do with the continuing presence of those spineless Democrats on Capitol Hill. Republicans who fail to back the "conservative movement" program to the hilt face discipline from within and hordes of flying right-wing monkeys from without. Democrats, in contrast, find that their interest advocates are so diverse and diluted that they can shuffle and delay and generally "keep their powder dry" for a reckoning that never comes.

As I observed when the Shepard bill first passed, Democrats’ support was always thin, in spite of the glowing rhetoric:

Frankly, they appear to be resigned to defeat. That’s why there’s no push to change some of those Republican votes (what about, f’r instance, those "moderate" Republicans like Chuck Hagel or Mike Crapo or Elizabeth Dole — who all voted against it — or John McCain, who sat out?). There’s no push to make sure that politicians who vote against the bill pay for it at the polls — even though doing so (painting the opponents as callous people who don’t care about minority rights, gay bashings, and are otherwise soft on crime) is a simple no-brainer.

That’s why they seem disinterested in overriding the veto, and making both it and Republicans’ congressional support for it a campaign issue for the 2008 vote. But I think there are other reasons for the disinterest as well.

Too many Beltway consultant types love to depict bias-crimes laws as "special interest" and "politically correct" legislation that only serve a small band of the electorate. They play off the media stereotypes created by folks like Andrew Sullivan and try to discourage their political clients for pushing this kind of law too hard.

Of course, the reality is that bias-crime bills are designed to protect everyone. White people, Christians, males — they’re all victims of bias crimes as well, and the law is intended to step protection for them, too, by stiffening the sentences for perpetrators.

Perhaps more important, bias-crime laws (as this week’s vote suggests) are a natural cause for progressives and moderates alike, because they are not only about defending minority rights, they’re about defending law and order and getting tough on criminals who inflict real harm on us all — especially on our communities in the efforts to heal the ethnic and religious divides within them.

Democrats are frequently accused, with good reason, of taking their minority votes for granted. They know that they can count on minorities to line up behind them in the election, even though when the right-wingers go to the mattresses, they can always be counted on keeping their powder dry and not firing a shot. So they can make grand but ultimately hollow gestures like this week’s hate-crimes vote, but never make the real effort needed to make these bills actually succeed.

But this bill is about all of us, not just minorities. If congressional Democrats are not willing to fight for it, they can just add it to their list of mounting failures in asserting their agenda.

One of the great frustrations that antiwar organizations have with these same Democrats is that their failures reflect an abysmal inability to lead. There’s so much polling, group-testing and triangulation going into their political calculus that there’s never any initiative to seize the issue by the reins and claim it for their own — even when there’s a clear-cut ethical, moral, and political imperative to do so. And this same wishy-washiness is precisely why voters are leery of Democrats: they don’t stand for anything.

The same is true of their long-running history of failure to pass a federal bias-crime law, which is starting increasingly to look like the historical failure of progressives to pass an anti-lynching law — a failure that recently inspired the Senate to pass a retroactive apology of sorts. Probably, in fifty years, we can expect a similar round of self-flagellation for the current failure.

Progressives could change all this, of course. But first, they need to start figuring out how to join hands with the people who are their natural allies, and paying attention to their issues, too — because more often than not, these are our issues.

Crumbling when it counts

-- by Dave

The Democrats who love to talk a good game about defending people's civil rights are in the process of establishing, once again, that it's all just talk.

Their moment of truth arrived two months ago when the Senate approved the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act and, in the hopes of overcoming a threatened George W. Bush veto, attached it to the national defense-authorization bill, which meant it then had to return to the House for conference-committee finalization.

Now 365 Gay News is reporting that, despite having more than enough votes to pass handily the first time around, Democrats can't seem to muster the will to make it happen this time:

House Democrats are reportedly resigned to removing the Matthew Shepard Hate Crime bill from defense authorization legislation.

Congressional Quarterly reports that House Democratic leaders believe they lack the votes to pass the measure.

The Shepard Act would add sexuality to the list of categories covered under federal hate crime law.

It passed the House in May and the White House threatened to veto it.

In an effort to get around a veto the Senate version tied the measure to the 2008 defense authorization bill. It passed in September and then went to conference where the two versions of the bill needed to be harmonized for a final vote. Since then the bill has been tied up.

Congressional Quarterly in a Tuesday report said that there now are enough votes to scuttle the legislation if the Shepard Act remains attached to it.

CQ which covers Capitol Hill extensively quoted unnamed House aides as saying House members on the conference committee are rewriting the defense bill and will likely recommend leaving out the hate crime provision.

That has apparently sparked differences with Senate conferees who want the Shepard Act to remain. Nevertheless it is expected that a compromise will be reached where the act will not be part of the spending bill.

Sadly, as much as deeply as it is disappointing, none of this is exactly a surprise. As I observed when the bill first passed:

Frankly, they appear to be resigned to defeat. That's why there's no push to change some of those Republican votes (what about, f'r instance, those "moderate" Republicans like Chuck Hagel or Mike Crapo or Elizabeth Dole -- who all voted against it -- or John McCain, who sat out?). There's no push to make sure that politicians who vote against the bill pay for it at the polls -- even though doing so (painting the opponents as callous people who don't care about minority rights, gay bashings, and are otherwise soft on crime) is a simple no-brainer.

That's why they seem disinterested in overriding the veto, and making both it and Republicans' congressional support for it a campaign issue for the 2008 vote. But I think there are other reasons for the disinterest as well.

Too many Beltway consultant types love to depict bias-crimes laws as "special interest" and "politically correct" legislation that only serve a small band of the electorate. They play off the media stereotypes created by folks like Andrew Sullivan and try to discourage their political clients for pushing this kind of law too hard.

Of course, the reality is that bias-crime bills are designed to protect everyone. White people, Christians, males -- they're all victims of bias crimes as well, and the law is intended to step protection for them, too, by stiffening the sentences for perpetrators.

Perhaps more important, bias-crime laws (as this week's vote suggests) are a natural cause for progressives and moderates alike, because they are not only about defending minority rights, they're about defending law and order and getting tough on criminals who inflict real harm on us all -- especially on our communities in the efforts to heal the ethnic and religious divides within them.

Democrats are frequently accused, with good reason, of taking their minority votes for granted. They know that they can count on minorities to line up behind them in the election, even though when the right-wingers go to the mattresses, they can always be counted on keeping their powder dry and not firing a shot. So they can make grand but ultimately hollow gestures like this week's hate-crimes vote, but never make the real effort needed to make these bills actually succeed.

But this bill is about all of us, not just minorities. If congressional Democrats are not willing to fight for it, they can just add it to their list of mounting failures in asserting their agenda.

Unfortunately, Democrats and white liberals in general have a history of capitulating on pushing forward an effective federal bias-crimes law. Consider just the recent history of this legislation:

-- Back in 1999, Republicans effectively managed to kill in committee the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which was sponsored in 1998 in the Senate by Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., partly in response to the James Byrd in Texas killing that spring, and it picked up impetus that fall with the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. It proceeded out of the Judiciary Committee, and proceeded over the summer to move toward a floor vote. In July, it was folded into the Commerce, State, and Justice appropriations bill, approved by a wide margin, and forwarded to the House.

Lying in wait for the bill were the Republican leaders of the House, particularly Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, both Texans with an oft-articulated animus toward the so-called "homosexual agenda." Despite broad and bipartisan support for the measure even among their own ranks, they managed to maneuver it to death--removing it from the Senate appropriations bill and sending it to the House-Senate conference committee, where it was dropped altogether on a straight party-line vote. Later that month, President Clinton vetoed the appropriations bill in part because it omitted the hate-crimes legislation, but he eventually capitulated and signed a budget bill that did not include the HCPA provisions.

-- Republicans again in 2000 managed to kill the HCPA's successor, the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. In June, it passed the Senate by a wide margin, 57-42, and proceeded to the House, attached once again to another appropriations bill, this time the Department of Defense Authorization Act. Again, it enjoyed broad, bipartisan support; House members in September passed a resolution by a forty-vote margin (232-192) instructing joint-body conferees to include the bias-crimes language in the DOD bill.

But once again, the bill ran into the tandem team of Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, who succeeded on October 5 in stripping the legislation from the authorization bill.

-- In October 2004, just before the election, Republicans managed to very quietly (and with hardly a whimper from Democrats) kill the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act of 2004. This was a bill that had been approved overwhelmingly by the Senate in June by a 65-33 vote. The House itself passed a resolution 213-186 instructing the House leaders -- namely, Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert -- to pass the bill through the House Conference Committee. They ignored it, and eventually stripped it out of the Defense Appropriations Bill to which it had been attached, effectively killing it.

There's a pattern here: Democrats -- either through spinelessness or surreptitious mendacity -- have a history of refusing to take the fight over hate crimes to the carpets. Every time they have the votes to pass one, they attach it to another piece of legislation, which renders it vulnerable to the seemingly inevitable euthanasia in committee. This either reflects an unexpressed wish to kill a hate-crimes bill, or a failure to recognize bias crimes as an essential matter, and write it off as a fight they can't win.

Indeed, it's mind-boggling that congressional Democrats seem incapable of connecting the big bright fluorescent dots in front of them when it comes to bias crimes -- that they lie, in fact, at the heart of the national cultural divide. This bill isn't just about gay rights. It's about the Jena 6 and noose incidents. It's about the tide of anti-immigrant hate crimes being committed against Latinos.

Bias crimes lie at the black beating heart of everything progressives have historically fought: injustice, bigotry, exclusion, and violence. These things are the enemies of democracy itself, and that is why we fight them. Effectively confronting and addressing them is an imperative: politically, ethically, morally.

So the sad if utterly predictable fate of the latest federal bias-crimes law really represents an act of cowardice. I suppose we can look forward, fifty years from now, to seeing subsequent generations of politicians finally step forward and recognize that this abysmal failure to adequately confront bias crimes was a gross historical mistake for which many thousands of Americans paid the price. After all, it's what the Senate did not long ago in confronting the legacy of a previous generation's purposeful failure to act against its version of hate crimes, lynching.

I won't be there to see it, of course, but I wonder if they'll all, once again, break their arms patting themselves on the back. The U.S. Congress seems real good at that sort of thing. Anything else, not so much.

UPDATE: Lane Hudson has more.