Hat tip to Brian at BlueNC for this news — homobigot Vernon Robinson, who tried and failed to unseat Congressman Brad Miller in the 13th District race here in 2006, has picked up something as a consolation prize — the “Willie” award for Worst Political Advertisement, given by progressive thinktank Growth & Justice.

Here’s what Vern actually put on the air to receive the honor; he does the NC GOP proud:

And a snippet the post I did back when that ad was first released (March 2006) is below the fold.
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A far greater danger.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling paranoid, I think the rumors that voting machines are rigged are floated to distract progressives from old-fashioned voter suppression tactics. I mention this, because there seems to be a trend lately of pushing for voter ID bills that are directly aimed at diverting legal voters from the polls, and now there’s one up in Missouri. I saw a presentation on this at the Texas ACLU conference, and the speaker Nina Perales from MALDEF really impressed upon me how many voters can be purged from a roll using these kinds of tactics. Often the types of ID required to prove citizenship are things that people don’t carry on them, or documents that native born citizens might easily acquire but naturalized citizens don’t have. I’m sure the document requirements vary from law to law, but the general rule of thumb is that it’s about putting obstacles between predominantly Democratic voting blocs and casting a ballot. A lot of people in targeted groups have reasons to want to minimize their contact with officials, so they will be rebuffed easily by the first person who turns them away at the polls, because they’re afraid to fight for their rights.

The voter ID bills are based on a faulty premise, which is that there’s widespread problems of people imitating others to vote. It’s a flimsy excuse, as Shark-Fu notes.

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Today Barack Obama zeroed in on equal opportunity bigotry — and why everyone should strive to not only elevate the political discourse, but to be honest about the base instincts, words and deeds that divide, not unite.

He delivered this message at the house of worship where Dr. Martin Luther King preached, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. It was a pointed statement to black parishioners in the pews — people well-aware of racial politics being played in this political cycle — but who are also are part of a faith community that has long had a blind spot toward other oppressed groups. He did not hold back:

For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

These words are so necessary, but you can best believe he is the only candidate delivering speeches in honor of Dr. King who is willing to say it directly to members of the black community. This topic has always been a perceived as a third rail topic for the other leading Dem candidates, Clinton or Edwards — they are, like many whites, particularly if they see themselves as allies, dread being seen as pointing out the evils and hypocrisy of such bigotry in the black faith community, even as wrong and tragic as it is on its face.

I am of two minds of this — I am grateful that Barack Obama, whose campaign has needed to atone for the triangulation strategy of courting blacks by tossing gays under the bus with the appearance of homophobic “ex-gay” advocate Donnie McClurkin at a gospel concert. He has made public statements distancing himself from this flap and reiterated support for LGBT equality (sans full marriage equality, of course, something none of the top tier have supported).

However, I am disheartened by the burden Obama has been saddled with, as a person of color, to be the sole party delivering today’s message. Addressing bigotry in any community that has suffered oppression at the hands of the majority can, and must be done, particularly in a year where we have both a woman and a black man with a credible chance of winning the nomination and making it to the White House.
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A major announcement is expected from the fearmongering, single-issue candidate this afternoon; looks like his one-issue “Brown Menace” campaign has run out of gas.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, who has been polling in low single digits throughout the Republican presidential campaign, has scheduled a "major announcement" concerning his long-shot campaign for Thursday afternoon in Des Moines, Iowa. …Tancredo is widely seen as a single-issue candidate, hammering away consistently on the topic of illegal immigration. A recent television advertisement drew widespread comment for its depiction of a hooded figure slipping into a shopping mall and leaving a back-pack bomb in a mall concourse, followed by the words, "Tancredo, Before It's Too Late."

Let's go to YouTube for that classic moment…
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The hypocrisy is breathtaking, but not surprising. Wouldn’t you think that Colorado’s Tom Tancredo, the GOP presidential wannabe who is running as a single issue (”Build the Wall”) candidate by bringing up The Brown Menace at every opportunity would want to Buy American when he is renovating his home?

Nope. He has a “sanctuary mansion” of his own. Max Blumenthal:

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them. Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.

During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn’t want us here, but he’ll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It’s just not right.”

Tancredo’s head-purposely-in-the-sand attitude when it comes to personally benefiting from the cheap labor provided by undocumented workers is shared by many Americans — and pols like Mitt Romney, who also employed people here illegally to work on his landscaping. You just have to shake your head at the bald hypocrisy.

This is funny, but probably not for the reasons Mike Huckabee thinks it is. The GOP prez hopeful is launching this ad in Iowa today.

The 60-second TV ad, called ‘Chuck Norris Approved,” features Norris’ endorsement of Huckabee as a “principled, authentic conservative.” The ad also discusses Huckabee’s support for the Fair Tax, securing the border, and the 2nd amendment.

“My plan to secure the border. Two words: Chuck. Norris,” says Huckabee, who stares into the camera before it cuts away to show Norris standing beside him.

“Mike Huckabee is a lifelong hunter who’ll protect our Second Amendment rights” on gun ownership, says the tough-guy actor, who takes turns addressing viewers.

“There’s no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard, only another fist,” Huckabee says.

“Mike Huckabee wants to put the IRS out of business,” Norris adds.

“When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the earth down,” Huckabee says.

“Mike’s a principled, authentic conservative,” says Norris.

In closing, Huckabee says: “Chuck Norris doesn’t endorse. He tells America how it’s going to be. I’m Mike Huckabee and I approved this message. So did Chuck.”

Some comments at the Huckabee site about the ad are below the fold.

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A new analysis released by the Census Bureau reveals that two Hispanic surnames –  Garcia and Rodriguez — have cracked the top 10 most common. This, I assume, will send The GOP Base over the edge.

The top 10 U.S. surnames
1. Smith (881 occurrences per 100K people)
2. Johnson (688)
3. Williams (569)
4. Brown (512)
5. Jones (505)
6. Miller (418)
7. Davis (398)
8. Garcia (318)
9. Rodrigues (298)
10. Wilson (290)

The NYT has an interactive chart where you can plug in your surname to see where it ranks. Spaulding is #1774 on the list, between Diehl and Ernst. Where's your name?

Smith — which would be even more common if all its variations, like Schmidt and Schmitt, were tallied — is among the names derived from occupations (Miller, which ranks No. 7, is another). Among the most famous early bearers of the name was Capt. John Smith, who helped establish the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Va., 400 years ago. As recently as 1950, more Americans were employed as blacksmiths than as psychotherapists.

In 1984, according to the Social Security Administration, nearly 3.4 million Smiths lived in the United States. In 1990, the census counted 2.5 million. By 2000, the Smith population had declined to fewer than 2.4 million. The durability of some of the most common names in American history may also have been perpetuated because slaves either adopted or retained the surnames of their owners. About one in five Smiths are black, as are about one in three Johnsons, Browns, and Joneses and nearly half the people named Williams.

…More than 96 percent of Yoders, Kruegers, Muellers, Kochs, Schwartzes, Schmitts and Novaks were white. Nearly 90 percent of the Washingtons were black, as were 75 percent of the Jeffersons, 66 percent of the Bookers, 54 percent of the Banks and 53 percent of the Mosleys.

My wife Kate's a native of Alabama, so I always give her grief when stories like this come up — Members of one Klan group plan to protest another in Cullman. She actually has relatives that live in this town; I've heard hair-raising tales about the racism and organized Klan activity there.  

Let's start from the beginning — a national branch of the Klan has secured a permit to hold a protest against illegal immigrants at the Cullman County Courthouse. (Cullman Times):

Dan Quinn, Grand Dragon of the Realm of Alabama for the Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., wrote to Mayor Don Green and the council asking for permission to hold the rally Nov. 10.

Quinn said the reason for the group’s meeting would be to speak “out against the invasion of our beautiful state by the illegal immigrants and their impact on our societies.”

However, another branch of the KKK will have none of this. Its leadership thinks that the other Klan faction is uncouth and un-Christian. Try reading this without laughing.

Members of one Ku Klux Klan organization say they will assemble at the courthouse Nov. 10 to show their opposition to another Klan group that plans an anti-immigration rally there that day.

Ken Mier, who described himself as an investigator for the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and the national office of the Ku Klux Klan LLC, said in an e-mail to The Cullman Times that his group is against the tactics of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which held an anti-immigration protest last month in Athens.

"We are opposed to the ignorance and stupidity as displayed by the individuals that thumbed their nose at the area churches by continuing to use racial slurs, threats and avoided Christian deportment," he said.

A lovely picture of the landscape for some balance.

Lest anyone accuse me of exaggerating some of the fundamental fucked-up-ness of West Texas and other pockets of wingnut goodness out there, a fellow resident of Alpine still stuck there sent me this recent editorial that ran in the paper. Apparently there’s some NAFTA-related controversy out there involving truck full of Mexican cargo, and the usual white racist crew can’t imagine Mexicans make anything that’s not more people or illegal drugs.

Thanks to a rare benevolent move on the part of the U.S. Congress, we can expect a delay in the Mexican trucks that were to traverse the beautiful Big Bend. A provision of the now-infamous NAFTA treaty provided a one-year pilot program that would have allowed Mexican trucks complete access to U.S. markets.

If, and when, the Mexican trucks do come, they can be identified by the fact that their drivers will be wearing large sombreros and firing indiscriminately toward puppies, kittens, small children and any other sizable object using the highway. This action should not be taken as random violence. It is simply a well-established Mexican safety measure. The owners of these trucks learn that air-horns are cheaper than air-brakes and act accordingly.

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A woman is beaten in front of her two young daughters. What’s the first line of advice from the peanut gallery? “Call the cops! Press charges! Call 911!”

Yeah. Okay. Maybe not in Georgia.

Emelina Ramirez called police to tell them her roommates were attacking her, punching and kicking her in the stomach. When the police arrived, they handcuffed her, took her to jail and ran her fingerprints through a federal database. She is now in an Alabama cell awaiting deportation.

Getting a beat down while brown is a crime.

Ramirez, 30, was three months’ pregnant in June when, she says, her roommates attacked her. The Carrollton police officer who arrested her did not speak Spanish. He charged her with simple battery and took her to jail.

When jail officials ran her fingerprints through their database, they discovered that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted her because she had missed a deportation hearing in Texas.

“The bottom line is: She was in the U.S. illegally,” said Lt. James Perry, the investigating officer in the case. “She was involved in an incident where the system caught up with her. That was that.”

Carrollton police do not target illegal immigrants, Perry said. In the last year, the department has worked with undocumented immigrants who were witnesses or victims of a July 2006 home invasion that resulted in murder at a trailer park. Since then, the Police Department has set up a Spanish-language tip line.

Still, the police report from the Ramirez case raises questions about whether officers do, in fact, target Latinos.

After Ramirez was arrested and her 8-year-old daughter went to the station to give her account of the incident, Perry said, he went back to the house to interview the roommates about the allegations.

Before asking questions, however, Perry asked the inhabitants for identification and observed “both body language and verbal language that led me to believe they might be illegal.” According to the police report, “we then told everyone they would have to go to the jail to be fingerprinted.”

We can thank Carrolton’s finest for showing us just how much of a priority crime fighting is–it’s pretty high, if the crime you’re worried about is an expired visa, or being brown, or having suspicious body language. The assault and battery? Not so much.

Note too, the lack of outrage of a beatdown of a pregnant woman–in this case, a Latina woman. And make no mistake, that’s because there is no concern for her or the fetus. If she was White, you’d see all sorts of outrage over the harm to the fetus. The DA would file charges. If she miscarried as a result, heads would roll. But she’s not White, and she’s not middle class, and her fetus won’t be a bundle of joy but just another brown face that too many people would like to see gone.

Xicanopower also reports that Ramirez was possibly abused by her ex-husband. This is a dirty little secret–abusers will hold the citizenship status of their partners over their heads. Report the abuse, go to jail. Lose your kids. Get deported.

I’m pretty sure some folks will step up and ask why she didn’t just leave. Why not leave her abusive ex? Why not leave this horrible situation with her psychopathic roommates? And the only thing I can say to that is, have you ever been through this? Abusers use everything at their disposal to control their targets–be it money, violence, fear, whatever. You don’t realize going in that someone is just a craptastic abusive jackhole. It happens gradually, and by the time it’s really bad you’re in so deep and you’re so messed up by the abuse that you feel there’s no way out.

Oh, and? If you’re an immigrant, apparently there is no way out, except to jail.

Thanks to Brownfemipowerfor the heads-up post.

Update (from XP, who posted this over at my site):

I finally got a little more information about the whole ex-husband deal. Her friend just left a comment on my site. This is what he just told me.

She did marry a police officer from Carrollton, GA who, instead of obtaining an attorney and getting her legal status straightened out, held her status over her head, and was abusive towards her. He is the father of her youngest US born child. After about a year and a half of abuse, and aid from a woman’s shelter, she obtained a divorce from the abusive cop, and thanks to him, remains “undocumented”.

Karlas’ father has not paid child support in I don’t know how long, nor has he made any attempt to see his daughter.

Is it being “undocumented” that’s the crime here? Or is it being brown and female?

I get the strong impression from this video that the maker did not intend the audience to walk away thinking that it would probably be best to just kill whitey. Nonetheless, that’s the message he managed to communicate. Let that be a lesson to all you would-be video propagandists.

Via Dadsmacker.

The immigration bill died miserably today. It wasn’t a good bill, but it’s sort of hard to be too happy about its death, seeing as how it’s the result of racist fear-mongering like this as much as anything.

You folks in Mississippi are so lucky to have such an amazingly insightful senator. How incredible is this interpretation of the immigration issue — The Brown Menace^TM as billy goats?

Sen. Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., was talking to reporters Wednesday about the immigration bill, when he said, “If the answer is ‘build a fence’ I’ve got two goats on my place in Mississippi. There ain’t no fence big enough, high enough, strong enough, that you can keep those goats in that fence.”

“Now people are at least as smart as goats,” Lott continued. “Maybe not as agile. Build a fence. We should have a virtual fence. Now one of the ways I keep those goats in the fence is I electrified them. Once they got popped a couple of times they quit trying to jump it.”

“I’m not proposing an electrified goat fence,” Lott added quickly, “I’m just trying, there’s an analogy there.”

Asked for clarification as to what exactly the analogy was, Lott spokesman Lee Youngblood said that the senator supported a variety of measures in the immigration bill, including unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles, radar and more border patrol agents, as well as a fence to reduce the flow of illegal immigration.

Portland mayor Tom Potter on yesterday’s immigration raid:

I am angered by this morning’s arrest by federal officers of approximately 150 Portland residents who were working at a local produce company.

I certainly understand why federal officials executed criminal warrants against three individuals who stole and sold Social Security numbers. But to go after local workers who are here to support their families while filling the demands of local businesses for their labor is bad policy. It also serves as a reminder of the failure of our national leaders to deliver an immigration policy that is both fair and humane to families and acknowledges the economic realities of our country.

Our nation would be better served if this kind of energy was focused on creating a comprehensive approach to immigration reform that provides a path to citizenship; addresses the immigration backlog that keeps families apart; and provides a safe and legal way for workers to enter our country and be productive workers and taxpayers. Immigrants provide more than mere labor in our community. They have long enriched our history, our culture and our city. My heart goes out to families dealing with the aftermath of this morning.

In this morning’s raid, no Portland police officers participated, and our Crisis Response Team was activated to help families affected.

As Atrios might say, reward (what certainly appears to be) good behavior. Mayor Potter may be reached by e-mail.

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I missed the boat.

Blog for Domestic Workers was on June 5. So here’s a post and a roundup.

First, Saltyfemme posts the announcement, and with her support for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.

Domestic workers, such as nannies and housekeepers do not currently have the protection other workers have. However, this may change in New York State.

For years, the more than 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and other domestic workers in New York State have been exempt from many basic labor protections.

But now 55 immigrant groups, labor unions and other organizations are trying to change that by pushing for legislation that would require a minimum wage of $14 an hour for the state’s domestic workers.

The legislation, called the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, would also require that these workers receive paid personal days, paid holidays, paid vacations, at least one day off each week, severance pay and 21 days’ advance notice before termination.

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Uh, yeah, I guess we have to pretend that didn’t happen.

Sadly, No caught John Derbyshire, who I do believe is an immigrant, getting a tad excited about some bizarre nativist meme that’s cropped up, which is opposition to the not-all-that-common phrase “Nation of Immigrants”. The phrase irritates racists, because it reminds them that the thin justification for their racist opposition to immigration falls completely apart if you remind them that white people had to immigrate here, too. And that some of us haven’t been here that long. (I’m only second generation on my mom’s side, my grandfather having been born in Mexico City. His last name is Williams. I enjoy confusing the hell out of racist anti-immigration types with that before scurrying off.) This particular phrase brings up uncomfortable truths, so has to go, according to a email the Derb got.

Derb—-I’m kinda with you here. … I’m a bit tired of talking about being a nation of immigrants. I’m not an immigrant. Neither are my parents, or their parents. I’m an American, and that’s the part of this country being undermined. We can’t simply be Americans, we all have to be immigrants. Best I can tell most of my family came from Germany well over a century ago. But I’m not a German, never been there, don’t really want to go. I’m an American. Let’s start calling ourselves that instead of this ridiculous Nation of Immigrants nonsense.

It’s a beautiful letter, noteworthy mostly for the strain on his brain from trying to ignore the point of the “nation of immigrants” rhetoric, which is to remind racists that their opposition to immigration, if applied consistently and fairly, would have kept their ancestors out of the country as well. But they were not Mexicans, except when they were, I suppose.

But by merely reprinting this email, the Derb forgets an entire race of people that hasn’t gotten their due in getting a racist slap in the face, so he comes back for seconds.

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Austin Greenwood, Hate Criminal (alleged)

Ashamed to be an Oregonian, today.

At 10:46 p.m. Thursday, a Clackamas County sheriff’s deputy responded to a disturbance at Wagon Wheel Park in Mulino, [Oregon] where Molalla Police officers were already on scene trying to restore order.

Two bruised and battered Hispanic men — Edwin Alfonzo Gonzales, 27, and Alex Bivian Guzman, 26 — told officers they had been confronted by a group of 20 to 30 white males at the park. Both men are employees of a Molalla lumber mill.

Gonzales told police that the instigator of the confrontation — later identified as Austin Wright Greenwood, 18, of Oregon City — hit him on the back with a large rock and encouraged others to do the same.

The white men, described by the victims as a “mob,” then began to surround Gonzales and Guzman. The men told police they were pushed to the ground, kicked, beaten and pummeled with large rocks…

After questioning Austin Wright Greenwood at the scene, a Clackamas County Sheriff’s Deputy placed him under arrest. The deputy reported that Greenwood said, “The only thing I did was wrestle with some fat Mexican.”

The deputy also reported that Greenwood spat on the patrol car window and urinated in the rear seat while he sat in custody. The officer said Greenwood also repeatedly hurled profanities at the deputy as he drove Greenwood to jail, where he is now lodged.

Now, I know full well that as soon as I mention Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, et al. I’ll be enlightened about how they never advocate violence, and that if we could just “solve” the “immigration” “problem” in this country things like this would never happen, and that the xenophobic ideologues have no responsibility for the actions of a few loons.

To which I say, fuck that. The thirty assholes led by Austin Greenwood are racist trash and will not be arrested in nearly the quantity they should, but it would take a shocking ignorance of American history on Malkin’s, Dobbs’, et al’s part to not recognize that racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric is essentially a loaded weapon.

People should march up and down the streets of D.C. with an American flag in one hand and a Mexican flag in the other until Michelle Malkin’s head explodes from cognitive dissonance.

So the political blogs were abuzz over the weekend about this “compromise” bill on immigration, which in true compromise fashion, is assumed will make no one happy. Or more to the point, anything other than lining up everyone with a Spanish last name and shooting them like dogs will never make Michelle Malkin happy. Racism, while sickening, is an interesting phenomenon to watch (I feel the same about sexism, which is above all why I write about it so much). The fact that racist hatred of Mexican nationals has reached this crescendo where anti-immigration people seem to want to pack them all up and send them—and their cheap labor—back to Mexico does seem to mildly contradict my grand theory of why people are so hateful (as a post hoc justification for exploiting a class for their labor).

But not really. I think that hatred, once unleashed, gets a life of its own. An underclass of people becomes hated, then feared, and then loathed and it becomes this visceral hate that becomes impervious to reason. By the time somebody internalizes the cultural lies that justify oppression, the hate rules her to the degree that she reacts mostly to her disgust and hatred reactions, and not to facts or anything like that. Witness Lou Dobbs pushing a faith-based notion that Mexican immigrants are leperous.

Meanwhile, look at how Dobbs reports some other statistics:

DOBBS: Let me cite them for everybody one more time and if we’ve got that graphic I’d like to do that, which in, by the way, in your publication you said the cases have been declining. Since 2000, they have in fact been doubling, rising from 76 to 110, to 133 to 131, 166 and you just listened to one of the most foremost experts in Bill Tucker’s report say to you that they are absolutely, absolutely understated and significantly so.

Did Dobbs say “doubling”? From 133 to 131? Really? What, did he graduate from Regent University or something?

Read Neiwert to get the full story at that link and at this. Needless to say, Dobbs believes the leprosy story because he’s reacting to his internal belief that Mexicans are unclean, and leprosy is famously the disease through much of civilization that has represented the unclean in literature, art, mythology, etc.

It’s a sorry state our media is in when people are given the national microphone to argue for oppressing entire races of people by trotting out irrational fears that said human beings are unclean, but this doesn’t especially surprise me. The main argument for abstinence-only education, once you wipe away all the bullshit, is that non-virginal women are unclean and don’t make saleable brides. And the main argument against reproductive rights is that sexual women are unclean and only purified by giving birth, preferably in a painful way. I was living on the border of the U.S. and Mexico when Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants, and I can assure Dobbs that god didn’t punish the tribe of El Paso with a plague of leprosy for daring to let the unclean walk amongst us.

Publius is right that it might be time to buckle down for a category 5 hurricane of racist hatred in the wake of this compromise bill. We already have people on national TV making rather unpolished arguments that Mexican immigrants are unclean and of course, it’s become mildly socially acceptable for conservatives to scream about “race suicide” in the face of the possibility that America will soon lose its white majority. That people are willing to base their entire argument on the false premise that losing a white majority is a bad thing (I’ve never seen even an inkling of a real argument as to why) tells you everything you need to know about how rationality has left the building on this issue and quite possibly never entered the building in the first place.

WingNutDaily has this feature it promotes, “MR. PRESIDENT!” (yes, in all caps), that collects questions for Dear Leader:

Ever have a great question to ask the president or Tony Snow? Ever been frustrated watching White House press conferences because reporters just “beat around the Bush”? Now’s your chance to participate. Post your tough questions for the White House at the MR. PRESIDENT! forum where they will be reviewed by WND editors and our White House correspondent. Who knows? Your question may be asked at the next White House press briefing.

I couldn’t resist checking them out, and no doubt, they are tough questions.

These folks are simply obsessed with The Brown Menace^TM — even more than the homos or the “Islamofascists.”

Read some of the masterful insanity after the flip.
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Angry Asian Man has a post up about a particularly odious proposal that echoes the Chinese Exclusion Act. If it was introduced as a bill and passed as a law, it would take away the right of legal immigrants to sponsor relatives to come here. This is how many Asian families come here.

According to Asian American community leaders, a newly leaked White House immigration reform draft could be as devastating as the Chinese Exclusion Act… they’re calling the document’s principles “inhumane” and “un-American” because it calls taking away the right of legal immigrants to sponsor their relatives to join them and breaking up families as a result: Asian American Activists Call White House Immigration Paper ‘Anti-Family’. It was drafted by key Republican Congressional representatives and circulated in Washington last week. The plan creates temporary visas for undocumented immigrants and new workers, but it also puts more limits on American citizens’ ability to bring their parents, children over age 21 and siblings to the United States.

If you or any of your family members have immigrated to the United States (I’ve had my share of relatives come through my house), you know that family sponsorship is fairly common immigration practice. And according to the Office of Immigration Statistics, the Asian American community is the second largest group of immigrants who enter the United States through family sponsorship or by being immediate relatives of American citizens. China, Vietnam and India are among the top ten countries whose immigrants arrive through family sponsorship. Because so many Asians enter the United States through family quotas, the result of this White House proposal being made into law could be devastating to Asian families. Representatives at the Organization of Chinese Americans and the Asian American Justice Center are likening it to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I realize it’s not even a bill introduced into Congress yet, however, we need to make our displeasure known before that happens. As these things pick up steam, they get harder to oppose.

You can get the White House number, or send an email, at the Asian American Justice Center site.

Put your money where your dumbass-looking flag is, Free Traders.

This kind of thing happens to me a lot: I was getting all ready to write an entire post about immigration policy and free trade, when I found out that there’s already a whole school of thought about my position. So pretend I wrote this:

Free migration or open immigration is the position that people should be able to migrate to whatever country they choose, free of substantial barriers. Although the two are not the same issue, free immigration is similar in spirit to the concept of free trade, and both are advocated by free market economists on the grounds that economics is not a zero-sum game and that free markets are, in their opinion, the best way to create a fairer and balanced economic system, thereby increasing the overall economic benefits to all concerned parties. Many libertarians, socialists, and anarchists advocate open immigration, notwithstanding other noteworthy differences among these three political ideologies.

Arguments against free immigration are similar to arguments against free trade, for example, protectionism or what critics claim to be xenophobia. Specifically, an influx of cheap labor could easily deflate wages for workers who are already established in a particular labor market, and (at least in the short term) have a negative impact on the standard of living for the more established workers. Other critics of free immigration are concerned that it would be unfair to current homeowners if an influx of new residents greatly brought down the property values and attractiveness of living in that location, or, alternatively, increased the demand to live in the city so much that the home owner would not be able to keep up with increased taxes from higher property values. However, free market economists believe that competition is the essence of a healthy economic system, and that any short-term negative impact on individual economic actors that is caused by free immigration is more than justified by the prospects of long-term growth for the economy as a whole.

Any position which attracts both libertarians and socialists is either batshit crazy or onto something. I really don’t see how it’s possible to argue for Free Trade and against free migration - not without betraying one’s claim to being a free marketeer.

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When I talked about how the system of global feudalism is so huge, and how it destroys people, I got a lot of strong reactions. While a lot of commenters got what I was saying, a lot didn’t. It either sounded to them like I was going to pillory them for shopping at Wal-Mart, or trash them for not doing enough political action. Neither was true–what tends to stop up the works in this movement is the obsession with one or the other.

I’m a big fan of organizing and political action, myself, but I do think it’s helpful to keep ourselves appraised of where the things we buy come from, and at what cost. These small individual consumer choices won’t change the world, but it will help to keep us focused, and keep us mindful of what’s at stake. I also think it could go a long way toward eroding some of our sense of entitlement.
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You said death first, uh-uh, death first!*
Photo: yoshiko314

I had intended just to cross-post something from my own blog over here regarding the raids at the Michael Bianco leather factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, but Sheezlebub, as befits a demon queen, screwed all that up. Now I’m resigned to just riffing off her a little bit and hoping she doesn’t smite me for it. Wait: Demons don’t smite, do they? That’s God’s domain.

Anyway, this:

This issue grinds my gears because it’s so huge. You can’t just point to one thing and say, If we just do X it will be better or If so and so was out of office, things would be better. Go on, try it: If we just bought less things would be better. Except they wouldn’t be because the things we buy would still be produced by people who are treated as just so much fodder for our needs and wants. Brown people in poor countries who we don’t see, brown people from poor countries here in the US who we choose not to see. We can choose not to buy as much, but thanks to planned obsolescence, we’re going to have to eventually replace things.

. . .

I can proudly declare myself the queen of personal purity if I forgo TV and buy my clothes at thrift shops only and never, ever drive anywhere. But even if I managed to find used clothes made of fabric that wasn’t woven by glorified slave labor in an EPZ somewhere, even if I ate only food grown in a local farm, even if I participated as little as I could in a rotten system of global feudalism, the system would still exist, and all of the smug high-five’s I’d give to my fellow travelers wouldn’t change this one whit.

–is what engenders that hopeless feeling, that learned helplessness feeling: The enormous scope of the problem. And that’s what makes the choice to do something or not to do something feel a little like the choice between tea and cake with the vicar, or death.

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The thing about news like the Michael Bianco raid in New Bedford, MA is that it’s the tip of a very large iceberg. By that I don’t mean ZOMG! the hordes of brown folks are like, totally invading our shores! No, it’s just one small indication of a huge system that grinds people into dust.

Our companies run from the very idea of paying a living wage. Better to pay executives the overinflated wage and bonus they now get rather than use the profits for the people who sweat for the companies. So companies will spend money to lobby for things like NAFTA and CAFTA. They will advocate and use export processing zones, also known as free trade zones, also known as “free to trade your lives for our mountains of plastic crap” zones.

Saying this invariably gets at least one person pissily declaring that I’m guilt-tripping them, that I’m acting like an elitist, and that I’m being mean. I know it’s oh-so-elitist of me to point out that maybe, just maybe, we don’t have a birthright to buy lots of stuff at other people’s expense. (more…)

The raid at Michael Bianco, Inc. in New Bedford, MA tore apart families. Working immigrant women and men were whisked off to detention centers out of state, while their children were left in Massachusetts.

The Department of Social Services is furious, as no one told them the raid was going to happen, and they had no support. There are still children in Massachusetts who do not know where their parents are (Texas, as it happens).

We can scream and holler all we want about undocumented immigrants and how awful they are, but until we understand and change the Byzantine system one must navigate to get visas, it’s time to shut up. Unskilled workers are not going to get the 140,000 immigrant visas for employment in the US–those are reserved for very highly skilled workers, as in engineers. They may have a shot at getting one of the 66,000 seasonal employment visas, but there’s going to be overflow. We make this overflow, and we make undocumented immigrants a necessity. (more…)

I’ve been looking for an excuse to post this Brujeria video ever since someone read my border piece and emailed me a link.

I think Nezua’s birthday is excuse enough. Party at his joint!

Feliz cumpleaños, Nez.

Jessica is still putting up guest posts from the panelists at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. The conference functioned as a really good demonstration of how relevant and accessibly “intersections of oppression” discourse can be. One noteworthy panel was on the problems facing pregnant and birthing immigrants, and particularly how xenophobia spins out of control when xenophobes are faced with the fecund bodies of immigrant women. The rhetoric slurring “anchor babies” or the children of immigrants is a particularly good example of how mean-spirited anti-immigration advocates can be. As today’s guest blogger Priscilla Huang points out, it even gets to the point where people are getting resentful of small babies who win cash prizes.

Huang’s post is a really good one. She draws parallels between the anti-immigrant rhetoric and the slams on “welfare mothers” and reminds everyone of how xenophobia is linked with the pressure on American women to have more babies, whether they want to or not.

Anti-choicers are also starting to get in on the immigration debate. In fact, many anti-immigrant advocates are also long-time anti-choice advocates who are manipulating the issue of immigration reform to advance their anti-choice agenda. In November 2006, a report from the Missouri House Special Committee on Immigration Reform concluded that abortion was partly to blame for the problem of illegal immigration because it caused a shortage of American workers. As the author, Rep. Edgar Emery, explained, “If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising we would be desperate for workers.�?

Read the whole post and check out Huang’s organization the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.

We have a little Mitt Romney Watch round up this AM…

Justice rules to expedite Mitt’s suit to override legislature

Associate Justice Judith A. Cowin ruled yesterday that Governor Mitt Romney’s battle to put the marriage rights of gays and lesbians up for a public vote will continue on to the full state Supreme Court on December 20, with Mitt hoping a decision will be made for maximum 2008 PR before he leaves office in January. What a mean-spirited, petty man. (Reuters): 

Angry that state lawmakers refused to act this month on the ballot question by agreeing to recess before taking a critical vote, Romney, who will leave office in January, said state legislators have a history of denying voters the right to speak on initiatives they launched.

The suit charges that state lawmakers have refused to follow five of the six initiative amendments that citizens proposed in the last 24 years. It asks the court to force state lawmakers to vote in this legislative session or order Galvin to put the question on the ballot in 2008. 

…For the proposal to get on the ballot, however, at least 50 state lawmakers would have to approve it in the current legislative session and one more time before the general election in 2008.

By voting 109 to 87 in November to recess until January 2, 2007, the last day of the 2005-2006 session, the Democrat-controlled body seemed to have all but killed the proposal in this session.

***

Gary Bauer tries to make the fundie case for Mitt

Sensing that his fundie brethren are a tad cool to prez hopeful Mitt Romney’s Mormonism (after all, most of them believe his religion is a cult), failed presidential candidate Gary Bauer tries to spin a way for the sheeple to accept the, let’s say, non-traditional “Christian” soon-to-be former Massachusetts governor. (AgapePress):

Gary Bauer, president of American Values, says Romney’s theology has no bearing on his ability to be president. “I think when it comes to political races, we need to go on the basis of the issues rather than theology,” says the outspoken conservative Christian.

Meanwhile, as Lurleen noted in the comments of another thread, Mitt has a little immigrant issue that’s bubbled up that won’t make Gary and the Freepi that Romney’s courting happy.
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From brownfemipower, apparently a Brooklyn judge John H. Wilson has decided to publish a children’s book that, to steal Molly Ivins’ joke, really sounded better in the original German. From the article:

In “The Hot House Flowers,�? self-published by Judge John H. Wilson, an envious dandelion releases her seeds into a hothouse, where they grow and eventually use up so much water and food that there’s none left for the plants that were already there.

In the end, the master of the hothouse - clearly standing for God - removes the dandelions, and when the original dandelion tries to send more seeds in, the hothouse flowers trample the seeds so they can’t grow.

“I didn’t like a lot of the children’s literature that I’ve seen,�? Wilson said Monday. “I really wanted to have something that discusses values that I think parents should want to convey to their children.�?

Naturally, they have Tim Bueler from the hate group the Minutemen praising the book. Part of me has to wonder if these folks aren’t generally Social Darwinists, and if so, wouldn’t they praise the dandelions for being such great evolvers and winning out? Then another part of me reminds the first part that these assholes don’t have any kind of intellectual consistency other than, “Urgh, white American better, chest thump.”

Wilson’s stroke of genius in comparing Mexican immigrants to weeds portends a long, lively career for him. I look forward to his next children’s book where he compares Jews to vermin. Oh, that’s been done? Well, odds are Wilson doesn’t know that.

I hesitate to come back to this topic, because every time I do, I get a bunch of trolls saying stuff like, “Just because the book compares Jews to rats who breed relentlessly and shit in your cereal doesn’t mean that author is racist. He’s just very, very fond of the Aryan race is all. Why do you hate the Aryan race so much?” (Further reading available here.) But I find myself drawn to having to write about this, because the escalation of fascist, genocidal rhetoric alarms me to no end. Scapegoating Mexican immigrants for our economic woes just like the Germans went after the Jews for theirs is a parallel that should make any thinking person’s blood run cold. This particular metaphor—the image of Mexican immigrants literally starving out white Americans—is especially brainless hate, since illegal immigrants provide so much cheap labor to grow, pick and process that cheap ass food that the delicate hothouse flowers-cum-sphincters like Wilson are clogging their arteries with. Mexican immigrants aren’t starving us, dipshits, they’re feeding us. And for bad wages and even worse work conditions a great deal of the time.

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My theory is that Missouri Republicans all attended a screeing of The Grapes of Wrath and afterwards, in a fit of nostalgia, agreed that they really wish for a return to the days when desperately poor migrant workers spoke better English. And in casting around looking for someone to blame, they happened upon American women, their second favorite target after gay men.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - A Republican-led legislative panel claims in a new report on illegal immigration that abortion is partly to blame because it is causing a shortage of American workers.

The report from the state House Special Committee on Immigration Reform also claims “liberal social welfare policies” have discouraged Americans from working and encouraged immigrants to cross the border illegally.

The statements about abortion, welfare policies and a recommendation to abolish income taxes in favor of sales taxes were inserted into the immigration report by the committee chairman, Rep. Ed Emery.

He added that it would be nice if Big Agra could bring back the return of the company store and force all the underpaid workers to buy everything from the store at a drastic mark-up, so that their entire paycheck went right back to the company to make payments on their spiraling debt. Some weak-willed members drew the line at the suggestion that foremen be issued whips to crack on people’s backs if they weren’t picking fruit fast enough, but analysts are hopeful that after some intense rounds of right wing talk radio, they’ll come around.

What I really love here is the notion that there’s something wholesome and upright about using government force to up the production capacities of Anglo uterine factories, for the sole purpose of driving down Big Agra’s labor costs while also sparing uptight, wealthy WASPs the indignity of hearing people speaking Spanish or seeing people with dark skin just walking about. Talk about corporate welfare! The report is a two-fer. Not only should American women raise more children at great expense to themselves to drive down labor costs for Big Agra, according to the report, the tax burden should also be shifted down the income ladder, so that the people who can least afford it are paying a bigger portion of their income to it.

I noted just the other day that the open racism of the anti-choice fringe is becoming more mainstream all the time, and this is just another example of it. What’s particularly interesting about this panel is that they seem to think that the demand for underpaid workers is what creates the supply and that illegal immigrants are pouring in from Mexico to fill some hole that otherwise wouldn’t be filled. It’s inconceivable to them that, absent of serious economic problems in Mexico creating the desperately poor immigration population, wages for farm pickers might actually have to just come up in order to get sufficient labor. Which is to say that while watching The Grapes of Wrath, they got so enamored of the idea of bringing back the Okies that they fell back on their favorite obsession of abortion without thinking through the reality of the situation.

All six Democrats on the panel refused to sign the report. Some of them called the abortion assertion ridiculous and embarrassing.

“There’s a lot of editorial comment there that I couldn’t really stomach,” Rep. Trent Skaggs said Monday. “To be honest, I think it’s a little delusional.”

The one thing the Democrats probably don’t realize what those of us who monitor anti-choice rhetoric noticed a long time ago, which is that wingnuts are really fond of the idea of having a homegrown underclass that they feel they could exploit in a myriad of ways. Not the least of this is how open they are about lamenting the way that the adoption market for healthy white babies has dried up, which they tend to blame solely on abortion but is also fed by the fact that the minimum standard of living has risen (particularly for white people—one of the lasting shames of America is the way that the rising standard of living was not shared equally) and the stigma attached to single motherhood has evaporated to the point that most single mothers keep their children rather than put them up for adoption. From the perspective of wealthy white people, then, if the market for direct purchases of healthy white people has dried up from increased abortion, the surely the market for pseudo-purchasing white people through wage slavery has dried up for the very same reason.

Now that I think about it, I’m skeptical that the Missouri Republicans are really even that concerned about immigration. After all, even if they were successful at growing the size of the American underclass, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t welcome a second feed into it from Mexico. The bigger the population of desperately poor people, the better for slashing labor costs until you can (in theory) get people to pay you for the privilege of picking fruit (i.e. the company store and other credit scams). The immigration thing is just a ruse to get racist white working class people to get all excited about what is really an attempt to impoverish them. What I hope people begin to see is that illegal immmigrants and working people in America are on the same team and racism is just a way to distract us from this fact. This transparent ploy to double the growth rate of the poor doesn’t do any working people any favors, regardless of where they were born.

This expose in the Texas Observer is a must-read. It’s on how, under the auspices of national security, the Rio Grande border is being militarized, and the focus is on a small town I know pretty well call San Elizario, which is right outside of El Paso. Fighting terrorism isn’t just an excuse to invade Iraq, it seems. It’s also an excuse to treat a friendly neighboring country like it’s an enemy, and worse, to treat our fellow Americans like they’re criminals for the crime of being Hispanic in a heavily Hispanic area of the country.

From January to June, the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department jumped the firewall between local and federal authority, setting up Operation Linebacker blockades in colonias and towns like this one, asking even U.S. citizens who looked Mexican to present papers…..

On a July morning, as Rubio spoke under a shade tree outside the family’s trailer home, his 11-year-old son, Jose Luis, tinkered with a car engine, and a lone, white egret was the only other creature visible in the expanse between Rubio’s yard and the line that marks the border. “What if a Minuteman mistakes me and shoots me?�? he asks. Then there’s the Guard. “They can make a mistake with somebody taking a stroll, because now there’s too many guns and too many people. Somebody will say, ‘I’m an American, you can’t tell me what to do,’ and there’ll be trouble. Sometimes you get mad when you get asked so much for papers. You feel racism starting to climb. You can feel the tension.�? Being asked for papers to go to the store “felt like those countries you hear about where soldiers and police are taking over and can search you,�? says Rubio, whose parents immigrated from Chihuahua when he was six. He votes, and like other residents, is pleased when he reads the Border Patrol has busted drug runners. “They could hurt my son,�? he says. But Rubio feels less ownership of his neighborhood now, questions why it’s feeling like a front line, and senses danger. “In a war situation you’re looking at people and asking, ‘Friend or foe?’ Well, now you’re getting people coming in from different parts, the Guard and Minutemen, and here we all look the same. In a war zone they don’t know who is who.�?

The fear of violence is not a hallucination. But it’s not just about the problems of the Guard harassing citizens who have darker skin than Michelle Malkin deems appropriate for U.S. citizens. It’s also a matter of the relative innocence of the vast majority of undocumented people that are hanging out on the U.S. side of the border. San Elizario is east of where the Rio Grande looks like it’s the river version of the Berlin Wall, and like most of the sparsely populated desert areas of West Texas, the border has a long tradition of being permeable. People on the border often have family living on both sides of it and there’s a lot of moving back and forth, which has roughly the same dint of evil to it as if you were talking about New Jersey and New York.

But despite the fact that in the reality-based world, people move back and forth constantly over the border for innocent reasons like seeking work or being with family, Gov. Perry is hiding behind the War on Terra to excuse the escalation of fear and intimidation on the border in West Texas.

The rhetoric of violence has taken over in a new way since September 11, 2001, replacing the language of immigration enforcement, border policy, or even drug interdiction with the language of fighting terrorism. When Gov. Perry’s Border Security Plan announced support for Operation Linebacker, its overview began with these words: “Al-Qaeda leadership plans to use criminal alien smuggling organizations to bring terrorist operatives across the border into the U.S.�? Douglas T. Mosier, Border Patrol spokesman in El Paso, says, “Our primary objective now is preventing terrorists and instruments of terrorism from entering.�? Rick Glancey, spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department, says its job is the “same as the Border Patrol, preventing terrorism.�?

I’m trying to wrap my mind around the hysteria that’s the source of this fundamental stupidity. When I was growing up on the border, racists would blather on and on about the problem of illegal immigration but they weren’t crazy enough to link it to terrorism. At worst, they tried to link illegal immigration to El Paso’s high car theft problem, which probably had very little to do with immigration per se and everything to do with the fact that the El Paso police department didn’t have jurisdiction in Juarez, so stealing a car is just a matter of getting it over the border. But the link between terrorism and Mexican nationals coming to America permanently or just for very extended visits is so thoroughly non-existent that I wouldn’t think anyone would dare try to link the two rhetorically.

Of course, we are talking the same group of people who think 9/11 was just the excuse they needed to invade Iraq, so nothing should surprise me. I look forward to further chapters of Shit We Can Excuse Away With the Word “Terrorism”. Maybe they’ll ‘deregulate” the media some more and say it’s in the name of national security.