Christmas came early for the law-abiding residents of Arizona's Maricopa County yesterday:

PHOENIX — In a strongly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department on Thursday accused Sheriff Joe Arpaio of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest and retaliating against those who complain.

After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which Mr. Arpaio leads, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.

“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others had been interviewed as part of the review, including Sheriff Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.

Mr. Perez said he hoped Sheriff Arpaio would cooperate with the federal government in turning the department around. Should he refuse to enter into a court-approved settlement agreement, Mr. Perez said, the government will file a lawsuit and the department could lose millions of dollars in federal money.

A separate federal grand jury investigation of Sheriff Arpaio’s office is continuing, focusing on accusations of abuse of power by the department’s public corruption squad.

That investigation -- unlike this probe, which involved civil law -- is a criminal matter. The other shoe has yet to drop on that score.

Arpaio, of course, claims that this is all politically motivated:

"Don't come here and use me as a whipping boy for a national, international problem," said Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The DOJ warned Arpaio to stop racially profiling Hispanic members of the community, or face the consequences. But Arpaio vowed to continue his controversial immigration sweeps.

"I took an oath of office. I'm enforcing the state and federal laws," Arpaio said.. "It's as simple as that, and I will continue to enforce those state laws."

The normally media friendly sheriff stayed away from the cameras for most of the day today. And when he did speak, it was during a late-afternoon news conference with his attorneys at his side.

"I'm going to say it again, I will continue to enforce all the laws," Arpaio said during the 40-minute news conference.

...

"President Obama and his band of his merry men might as well erect their own pink neon sign on the Arizona-Mexico border saying welcome to your United States," Arpaio said. "Our home is your home."

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Bill O'Reilly cooked up another way to attack President Obama this week -- by suggesting that he was associating with racial radicals again, namely, the National Council of La Raza:

O'REILLY: But the president spoke to La Raza this week. La Raza, a pretty radicalized group. I think they're further left than you are. I mean, they don't like any kind of border security, they want amnesty for all the people here. They object to almost every kind of measure to control illegal immigration. And yet the president feels comfortable there. Do you think he's just posturing?

This is why O'Reilly enjoys about as much credibility among Latino viewers as Lou Dobbs -- which is to say, nearly zero. Because everyone who knows their way around the immigration scene is perfectly aware that NCLR is a very temperate, middle-of-the-road organization -- and in fact is frequently criticized by other Latino groups for being too safe and cautious, and for being corporate sellouts. (Your mileage may vary.)

Indeed, all O'Reilly and his crack staff would have had to do is visit NCLR's website to read this:

Unfortunately, NCLR has been called an “open-borders advocate” and the “illegal alien lobby” numerous times. NCLR has repeatedly recognized the right of the United States, as a sovereign nation, to control its borders. Moreover, NCLR has supported numerous specific measures to strengthen border enforcement, provided that such enforcement is conducted fairly, humanely, and in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

There are a whole bunch of falsehoods about NCLR -- beginning with their name -- that endure as right-wing myths. I bet O'Reilly has pretty much swallowed those whole, too.

I took part in a small-group discussion at Netroots Nation this morning with Rep. Luis Gutierrez organized by the fine folks at America's Voice, and afterward I managed to squeeze in a brief interview kind of summing up the discussion.

The upshot: President Obama's political team may well be endangering his ability to gain re-election by deferring action on immigration -- not merely in passing comprehensive immigration, but in providing administrative relief for DREAM Act-eligible students, and laying off its draconian "Secure Communities" initiative -- because it wants to tackle these issues in its his second term.

As the congressman said:

GUTIERREZ: That's what he doesn't understand, I think, is that people just won't show up. And you know what? There's nothing more, I believe, that the Republicans want, than to see us just kind of sit on our hands. 'Cause guess what -- they're voting. They're not staying home. You can say in the polls they're 10 points behind, but they're still going to show up the next day. Our folks? We need to be fed.

C&L: Well, if you're being taken for granted ...

GUTIERREZ: And we have been. And unfortunately, we have an administration who made us a promise about bringing about comprehensive immigration reform. Now, are there challenges this president -- are there challenges the president of the United States could have been defeated on? Yeah. But you see, what they want is someone who goes down fighting.

I would say that the congressman is talking about a lot of progressives from across a wide spectrum.

But this is a significant case of short-sightedness. Latinos delivered the vote for Obama and Democrats in 2008. They saved the Senate for Democrats in 2010. And now the administration's inaction threatens to wash all that down the drain -- along with their own re-election chances. That's plain stupid.

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA) is one of those low-profile do-nothing Representatives in the House that manages to get re-elected over and over again because he represents a district which is changing, but still has its fair share of bigots and tea party types. I know. I live there, and he represents me.

An adopted son of Simi Valley, Gallegly panders to the Tea Party while pulling in major money from builders, insurers, and defense contractors in California.

He is also extreme -- highly extreme -- on the topic of immigration, despite the fact that his district has a growing Latino population and relies on that population to keep the economy moving.

He is also now the gatekeeper for any immigration legislation we might see coming from the House of Representatives. As chair of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, he is taking a hard-line approach to immigration reform.

Via America's Voice:

Yes, Gallegly wants to force a mass exodus of undocumented immigrants from the United States -- said as much at his first hearing:

"Good morning," Gallegly begins. "I have long said that the way to solve the problem of illegal immigration is fairly simple.

"First, we must enforce our laws and secure the border. Second, we must remove the magnets that encourage illegal immigration. And finally, we must remove the benefits that make it easier for them to stay."

In other words, if it’s not easy for “them” to stay, they leave.

And this:

In a July 2009 op-ed for The Hill, Gallegly argued for the passage of his animal-crush bill, noting that such snuff films are somehow connected to illegal immigration and crime: "[G]ang activity, illegal gambling, drug trafficking, illegal immigration and acts of human violence all go hand in hand with animal cruelty." (The piece had been posted on Gallegly's official congressional website, but it has since been taken down.)

In the op-ed, Gallegly echoed the conservative criticism that illegal immigrants bring with them a bigger world of crime, and he points out that an Arizona crime syndicate that "preyed on illegal immigrants, subjecting them to kidnappings, home invasions, and armed robberies" is also being accused of "raising roosters for illegal cockfighting matches." While linking illegal immigration and animal-crush videos, Gallegly also maintained that animal abusers tend to become serial killers. The Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, and the Unabomber all had a history of torturing animals, he writes, and Jeffrey Dahmer "progressed from cutting up animals to cutting up humans and eating them." Gallegly was lumping together illegal immigration, animal murders, and the worst serial killers of modern times.

Gallegly has long been a leader of the movement to end birthright citizenship, and his idea of immigration reform is mass deportation. Despite the fact that 40% of his district is Latino, Gallegly really only represents Simi Valley, a bedroom community comprised of mostly white people fleeing the San Fernando Valley in search of a place with more people "like them".

If you're reading this and think that Republicans care about the economy, think again. When it comes to immigration, they're quite willing to blast open the economy and drive states into bankruptcy -- California in particular -- by deporting people who contribute billions to the economy on a state and national level.

Here's what he wants to do after shipping people out of the state, whether they're here legally or not (he's also targeting H1B visas, by the way). First ship them out, then make E-Verify mandatory.

Gallegly is fearmongering and playing to the xenophobes who fear anyone who looks, speaks, acts or thinks differently from them. Make no mistake -- he's as bad as the Steve Kings and LaMar Smiths out there...but he flies under the radar on purpose, while intentionally trying to stir division between Latinos and blacks, native Americans, and others.

Watch out for him...I'll be keeping an eye out, too.

I guess this is how Republicans do the Latino-outreach thing: Demonize Latino children, threaten to take away their birthright citizenship, and blatantly lie about the numbers of "anchor babies" being born by mothers coming here specifically to have citizen children.

Here's Sen. David Vitter yesterday on Fox News, promoting his new federal bill to strip American-born children of undocumented immigrants of their birthright citizenship:

VITTER: It's a very real problem. About 200,000 women come into this country annually from other countries legally, with a tourist visa, something like that, to give birth in this country so that child can automatically become a U.S. citizen. 200,000 a year!

I'm guessing that Vitter's source for this number is either somewhere up his own nether regions, or those of hate groups such as FAIR and CIS that pump out fake statistics like this for eager Latino-bashers like Vitter and his three Senate colleagues to regurgitate into policy.

Because, as ABC News explained in their own report on this legislation:

Of the 4.2 million live births in the United States in 2006, the most recent data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics, only 7,670 were children born to mothers who said they do not live here.

Some of those mothers could be "baby tourists," experts say, but many could be foreign college students, diplomatic staff, or vacationers. The government does not track the reasons non-resident mothers are in the United States at the time of the birth or their citizenship.

Indeed, as the story notes, the "anchor baby" problem is a statistical pimple:

"There's no evidence that birth tourism is a widespread problem," said Michele Waslin, a senior policy analyst with the Immigration Policy Center. "There are ways to dealing with that issue without such sweeping changes. This is like using a sledgehammer, not a scalpel."

Indeed, as we explained when Russell Pearce trotted out the same garbage in Arizona:

[T]his is a sick joke. Surveys of undocumented workers have made indelibly clear that they don't come here to have "anchor babies," or to get our free health care, or any of the other fantasies harbored by nativists: they come here for jobs.

Moreover, there's no serious benefit to be had from having your child be born a citizen -- because under American law, you can be deported anyway, and in fact thousands of parents of American birthright-citizen children are deported every year: 100,000 of them over 10 years, to be precise.

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[Video courtesy of America's Voice: H/t Maria and Jackie]

Establishment Republicans -- the business-friendly wing of the party -- have been trying to talk a good game when it comes to Latino voters -- their ruling Neanderthal Nativist wing notwithstanding. Now they're out hustling to convince Latinos that they really should vote Republican -- kinda like the way all good chickens should go vote for Colonel Sanders.

Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich are out leading the charge, as it were:

But Republicans overall still lost the Hispanic vote nationwide by about 2-1 — not much different than in 2008.

Bush wants to change that. "The challenge, though, is that we have a situation right now where Republicans send out signals that Hispanics aren't wanted in our party, not by policy so much as by tone," he says.

But it's more than just the tone. It's one issue in particular, says Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a participant in Thursday's conference in Miami.

"Latinos are inherently conservative: They're socially conservative; they are entrepreneurial; they're pro-business. Immigration ... is that one issue that prevents us from winning the support of Latino voters," he says.

Yeah, if only they didn't have the people running the party right now out there demanding we alter the Constitution in order to deny Latino children their birthright citizenship.

But in realituy, gingrich of course talks out of both sides of his mouth, defending Arizona's SB1070 while trying to do Latino outreach. Similarly, Jeb is in denial about just how deeply in their thrall Republicans really are:

Even though anti-immigrant voices seem to be getting louder inside the Republican Party, Jeb Bush is convinced that they do not speak for most on the right.

"That view is in the minority even in the Republican Party," he says. "But, I think if you got to the point where legitimate, emotional concerns about the lack of border security and the lack of rule of law, once those issues subsided, then you would find a great majority of people that would support some solution to the large number of people that are here illegally."

One of the Republicans speaking out and pushing them to abandon their delusions has been conservative Latino columnist Ruben Navarette:

Columnist Ruben Navarrette, who is also speaking at the conference in Miami, says there is a new conversation going on beneath the surface in the GOP — particularly when it comes to the push by some Republicans to repeal the 14th Amendment in order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented parents.

"They're not fools — they realize that there are those places where they can overplay their hand, and I think the 14th Amendment change is a perfect example of a bridge too far," Navarrette says. "It's poison. You play with that, and I am never, ever going be able to go before a group of Hispanic women ... and convince them that the Republican Party isn't anything but a bunch of ogres."

Indeed. This weekend at the big shindig for GOP Hispanics he had the same message, as Frank Sharry blogged yesterday:

Early in the day, Bush stated:

It would be incredibly stupid [for the Republican Party] to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote.

Given the anti-immigrant rhetoric that emanates from so many GOP leaders these days, however, it won’t be a simple matter to win these voters back.

As a new America’s Voice memo makes clear, Republican leadership is stuck in a deep rut of denial and inflexibility when it comes to Latino outreach and their party’s position on immigration. They seem to think that taking up kinder, gentler “rhetoric” and reaching out on “common values”—instead of revisiting their party’s extreme immigration policies—will do the trick.

One panelist at the conference, conservative syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette, made this very point quite passionately at this afternoon’s panel on media and messaging. From a live blog of the conference:

Update - 2:55 PM: Navarrette: "If you come away thinking that this is all about language and tone, you will miss the point... You are always going to be number 2... The problem is not the tone. It is the message itself—it is offensive, racist. You’ve got to fix the product.” […]

Commentator Alex Castellanos, Sr. disagrees. He appears to believe that a majority of Latinos agree with the Republican Party on immigration policy.

Helen Aguirre disagrees with Castellanos: "Jeb Bush is the only one who challenged Tom Tancredo. If the [majority of the] Republican Party disagrees but keeps quiet…"

Ruben Navarrette argued that the GOP has a track record on immigration that:

1. Deals with immigration dishonestly
2. Caters to that ugly element of racism -- "nativism/racism is in the bloodstream"
3. Offers "solutions" that ignore the problem.

Navarrette cites the fight to repeal the 14th Amendment and Arizona's SB1070 as two examples of false solutions on immigration.

Lotsa luck to these folks. They're going to need it: The GOP in reality is in the deep thrall of the Tea Partiers, who are some of the most mouth-foaming and nasty nativists in the country.

We already knew that right-wingers have by and large become conscienceless liars -- that, after all, is what keeps sites like this one in business. But the lying about the DREAM Act as a Senate vote nears has been quite remarkable, really.

The most outrageous instance, of course, is the revelation that William Gheen's nativist ALIPAC outfit (recently featured on Fox and Friends) was caught encouraging their would-be phone callers to lie about their residential status when they called Congress members to lobby against the DREAM Act. (See Andrea Nill at the Wonk Room for more.)

Then there was Sen. Jeff Sessions last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, where he was of course permitted (indeed encouraged) to trot out the usual right-wing canards against the DREAM Act without challenge, including this:

HANNITY: All right. You sent out a press release, you're urging colleagues to oppose Dream Act amnesty. Why do you call it amnesty? And let's go into some detail on this.

SESSIONS: Because, Sean, it puts the applicants who qualify for this standard on a guaranteed path to citizenship. All they have to do is really just attend college for two years. They do not have to have a degree. Only a sliver of those will use the military. Ninety percent plus would use the college type and degree program to gain this amnesty. And it would deal with a million, two million individuals, up to age 30. It's just not the right policy. It would in fact just be -- be just the opposite of what message we should be sending, which is that we're going to end the lawlessness at the border and create a lawful system of immigration and stop rewarding illegal immigration.

...

HANNITY: All right. They're claiming this bill would only grant amnesty to children of illegal immigrants who join the military or attend college for two years. You're claiming that this would grant nearly unrestricted amnesty. Why is there such a conflicting view of what the bill says? Are they misrepresenting the bill?

SESSIONS: No -- well, what version of it? But if fundamentally all you have to do is sign up at a community college, even a correspondence course and understand it for two years, and claim you want to attend college basically, and want to get a degree, and that's all you have to do. You do not have to have a degree. Very few people are going to use the military option. Probably less than five percent, three percent, two percent. Most of them will use this education option to try to gain legal status, and you can do it up to age 30. Once a person is then legalized, they're able to legalize their brothers, who may have been the person who brought them here illegally. They can bring in other people from outside the country. And so these bills, there's so many different versions of it, but are just unwise. And also, one terribly dangerous thing is, an individual can just assert, once they're subject to deportation, that they're working on their degree and claim the benefits of the Dream Act, and really gum up the entire legal system. It would be a major detriment to enforcement.

This is just a flood of flat-out falsehoods. As a National Immigration Forum fact sheet [PDF file] explains:

Hyperbole about “floodgates” is just that—hyperbole. The DREAM Act is a limited remedy for students who can prove several key elements, including the fact that they have good moral character, graduate from a high school, or receive a GED in the U.S., go to college or join the military.

Around 800,000 students could ultimately benefit under the DREAM Act, and even if those students jump through numerous hoops and become U.S. citizens, they can never sponsor distant family members—such as uncles and cousins. Immigration law doesn’t allow it.

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So Sen. Harry Reid, having won his election thanks to a wave of motivated Latino voters, is now planning to push for a vote on the DREAM Act in the lame-duck session of Congress.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was re-elected last week with strong support from Hispanic voters, will make one last push in the final days of the 111th Congress to pass legislation allowing illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to earn legal status if they attend college or serve in the U.S. military.

Advocates of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act - better known as the DREAM Act - say Reid has a better chance of passing the bill in the "lame duck" session than he would when the new, divided Congress is sworn in this January.

Nancy Pelosi is on board in the House, and there's also substantial popular support as well:

The DREAM Act enjoys strong support across party lines. After hearing a brief description, sixty-six percent of voters support the DREAM Act, including majorities of Democrats (81%), independents (60%), and Republicans (57%).

All of which means, of course, that the American Right will throw a hissy fit and do their damnedest to shout the bill down. Leading the shouting, as always, will be the chief organ in their propaganda Wurlitzer: Fox News.

With Jon Scott doing a "fair and balanced" report yesterday on Happening Now, we got a sample of what we've come to expect from Fox's reportage on the DREAM Act: falsehoods and distortions, particularly from Iowa's favorite nutty nativist, Republican Rep. Steve King, who was permitted to lie blatantly about what the act would do.

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Today's little missive from Tea Party Nation about Nevada made me laugh out loud, and should amuse you too. I especially liked the part where they blamed Sharron Angle for losing the Latino vote:

They did not understand how to attract Hispanic votes. And they had better learn fast if they want to win any future elections. Hispanics are good people, family is their foundation, there are many Hispanic small business owners, and Hispanics should be part of the conservative movement. Conservatives and Tea Parties must learn how to communicate with and win over Hispanic voters or risk becoming obsolete.

OhReally? Now why on earth would Latinos want to align with people who say things like this in public? By the way, the Tea Party meeting where those words were uttered was the brainchild of Tea Party Nation. Or maybe Latinos should align with the same people who called for Tea Party members to arm themselves against the "illegals". Or the people who told Ruben Hinojosa to "go back to Mexico." Or maybe, they should align with them because Republicans unanimously blocked the DREAM Act?

Sharron Angle was a Tea Party Express project, not Tea Party Nation. In addition to being at war with the GOP, they're at war with each other. The Tea Party Express is the West Coast corporate front and Tea Party Nation is the east coast contingent, but they aren't especially friendly. In fact, they cancelled their "unity convention" because there is no unity among them. One could muse that unity would require some give-and-take, which is antithetical to the Tea Party, but really, they're competing interests on the larger corporate money landscape.

The bottom line: Marco Rubio or no Marco Rubio, the Tea Party is not a friend of the Latino community, no matter how much they claim otherwise.

I just love it when Karl Rove goes all Projectionist on us and starts whining that the Obama White House is being tooooooo political. Anticipating today's planned speech on immigration reform from President Obama, Karl Rove went on Greta Van Susteren's show last night and warned that this was all Machiavellian theater:

Rove: Now, I gotta tell you, this is cynical, and it is hypocritical, and it's political with an issue that oughtn't to be treated sincerely, honestly, and outside of politics as much as possible.

I don't think the president's really interested in passing comprehensive immigration reform this year. He just wants a political issue to jazz up Latinos, and to get them to vote, maybe not for Democrats this fall, but for him in 2012.

Rove does this a lot.

It's what a poker player calls a tell: Whenever you hear that little high hitch in Rove's voice, it means he's scared.

He knows all too well that the Republicans' bellicose Latino bashing, embodied in Arizona's SB1070 and the right's ongoing adamant defense of it, will cost Republicans Latino voters for many years to come -- and considering demographic trends, that spells disaster for the GOP. Newt Gingrich knows this too, and has tried to use similar wedge rhetoric to cast Obama's motives as purely cynical.

It's true that Obama has been more timid than he need be on the issue, and his pandering to the nativists with National Guardsmen has been a source of real dismay.

On the other hand, he campaigned openly on immigration reform, and brought it up frequently during the 2008 election. He's also continually promised to move it forward, though as Rove suggests, his commitment has tended to flicker in the wind.

Still, it took Republicans in Arizona to finally prove, once and for all, that comprehensive reform can't wait. Because if it continues to sit on the back burner, the Republican nativists are going to be busy enacting their agenda in the vacuum.

It'll kill them in the long run -- maybe even in the short run too -- but they can't help themselves. It's just in their natures. Like projecting his own ugly predilections onto everyone else is in Karl Rove's.