This is the madness that oozes from our House of Representatives and the Republican Party. Our old friend Rep. Steve King is palling around with G. Gordon Liddy these days, brewing a nasty cauldron of hate to "see if it will come to a boil."

If it does, I only hope it spews its poison back on King and Liddy.

This is a clip from King's appearance on Liddy's show. It begins with Liddy referencing Mexicans and ice cream cones and segues into King being "offended" by Holder and the President.

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King: When you look at this administration, I'm offended by Eric Holder and the President also, their posture. It looks like Eric Holder said that white people in America are cowards when it comes to race. And I don't know what the basis of that is but I'm not a coward when it comes to that and I'm happy to talk about these things and I think we should. But the President has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race - on the side that favors the black person.

I see. A default mechanism. Got it. As if this wasn't bad enough, today King went on Radio Iowa to defend his comments.

During an interview on the G. Gordon Liddy talk show, King said President Obama has a “default mechanism” that “favors the black person.” King also accused U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder of not pursuing a series of cases because those accused were minorities.

“I have no regrets about what I said. I stand by what I said because what I said is accurate. It’s factual,” King said during a telephone interview with Radio Iowa late this afternoon. “I think the president should answer and Attorney General Holder should answer for the justice department being used in the way it is, but what I said was accurate and it was objective.”

Hmmm. What part is factual? The part about prosecutions or the part about default mechanisms?

Speaking of default mechanisms, let's review Steve King's record.

• October, 2009: ...the hate crimes bill results in a "pedophile protection act," and is meant to create "thought crimes" and protect "sexual idiosyncrasies."
• February, 2010: "It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America." (Referencing the attack on the Austin IRS office that killed one agent)
• March, 2010: King declared that a peaceful uprising, a la the successful overthrowing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on the streets of Prague in 1989 "would be fine with me."
• May, 2010: "Gay people should stop wearing their sexuality on their sleeve."
• May, 2010: "The ACLU, SEIU and the Muslim American Society are calling the shots at the Justice Department. The 'draft complaint' DOJ has prepared to challenge the Arizona law is a 'cut & paste' version of the class-action lawsuit the ACLU filed in United States District Court on May 17th. "

These are just a few examples. Who is it with the default mechanism on minorities? Projection, much, Representative King?

Just in case you thought it was safe to be something other than white in this country, Steve King wants to make you a little nervous:

“I actually, when this first popped…I told my people here that handle my media: ‘Let’s let this cook for a couple of days and see if this pot will come to a boil,’” King said. “I don’t want to put it away in the first day because I think the American people need to have this debate about what appears to me to be an inclination on the part of the White House and the justice department and perhaps others within the administration to break on the side of favoritism with regard to race.”

Whacko racism isn't new in this country at all. But it's really disturbing when it comes from someone who is involved in forming the laws of our land. Really disturbing.

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There are some things about state Sen. Russell Pearce, the author of Arizona's new police-state immigration law, that Greta Van Susteren and all the other Fox anchors who've had him on this past week aren't telling you.

Indeed, they let him just come on and spew misleading nonsense, as he did last night on On the Record, telling Van Susteren that the law only "takes the handcuffs off" for law enforcement officers and "allows" them to arrest suspected illegal immigrants. Actually, it requires them to.

Well, we mentioned previously that Pearce has a colorful background involving the white-supremacist far right, including dalliances -- like his close pal Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- with neo-Nazis.

Rachel Maddow discussed some of this in her segment last night, but it's worth discussing some more so that people can fully appreciate the nature of the police state just signed into law in Arizona. Byron York has proclaimed it "a very carefully crafted law" -- and he is quite correct about that. Crafted to what end, however, is quite another story.

Y'see, back in 2006, Pearce caught a lot of people's attention by forwarding to a bunch of his friends and associates an article on immigration from a neo-Nazi news source -- namely, the National Alliance, the folks who brought you The Turner Diaries. The article was about Jewish control of the media and how it supposedly creates a bias against whites and favors minorities and Israel. Pearce apologized, but never could explain why he was reading material from the National Alliance in the first place.

But then he was seen working arm in arm with this fellow:

That's a guy named J.T. Ready, who also happens to be one of Arizona's leading neo-Nazis. Here's J.T. at a neo-Nazi rally in Nebraska:

Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times reported:

Ready's tight with state Representative Russell Pearce, who's bashed Mexicans ever since a Latino teen shot off his finger when he was a county sheriff's deputy. Pearce is a racist law machine, pumping out statute after statute targeting the brown segment of AZ's population. At a June anti-illegal demonstration at the state Capitol, Ready and Pearce worked the crowd arm-in-arm.

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BLACK-BROWN TENSIONS IN LA

DAVEY D, FNV NEWSLETTER - For those of you reading this who live outside of Los Angeles you should note the that folks are on edge cause of increasing racial tension between blacks and Mexicans. Over the past month there have been a few brawls at local high schools which were widely reported on the news down here.

Now the tensions have been inflamed by a letter that has been circulating around the city claiming that in retaliation for some beef between black and latino gangs, 500 black kids wearing white t-shirts would be targeted and killed by Mexican gangs on Cinco de Mayo which is today. For the most part, the letter appears to be a hoax. Folks who work closely with the gangs down here have not heard of any craziness jumping off, but because the letter has been so widely circulated, it has led to some town hall meetings and increased police presence on all the high school campuses down here. A lot of parents are refusing to let their kids come to school...read on

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It turns out that the Arizona immigration-bashing nativists who enacted SB1070, led by State Sen. Russell Pearce, were just getting started in their campaign to drive out Latino immigrants:

E-mails to and from Ariz.state Sen. Russell Pearce reveal the immigration enforcement debate may not stop with SB 1070, the controversial immigration law.

Pearce, R-Mesa, the author of Arizona’s immigration law, has been writing to some of his constituents about what he plans to accomplish next.

In e-mails obtained by CBS 5 News, Pearce said he intends to push for a bill that would enable Arizona to no longer grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil.

Pearce wrote in one e-mail: "I also intend to push for an Arizona bill that would refuse to accept or issue a birth certificate that recognizes citizenship to those born to illegal aliens, unless one parent is a citizen."

CBS 5 Investigates looked through hundreds of e-mails Pearce had sent to constituents and some of their replies. The e-mails varied from praise to criticism and outlined Pearce’s future plans. Most were about SB 1070, his immigration law.

E-mails from the law’s supporters outnumbered those from critics by seven to one.

One supporter wrote, "I think it is about time we take our state and country back from the Mexicans."

So Pearce went on Bill O'Reilly's show last night to try to explain his thinking. According to Pearce, the 14th Amendment doesn't actually say what it says in in plain language:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

O'Reilly, of course, is not much help: He counters Pearce by observing that this is "federal law" -- though that is hardly the half of it, since this particular principle, of birthright citizenship, is embedded in the Constitution and is indeed a proud part of America's heritage as a nation of immigrants.

Pearce wants to claim that this only refers to people with "legal domicile" in the U.S. -- even though the words appear nowhere in the Constitution.

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The Big Picture: Criminal probe into Goldman Sachs

Our Future: Unfree Markets: The last gasp of a (literally) bankrupt ideology

ginandtacos: How to spot an illegal immigrant

Dillsnap Cogitations: This amusing excerpt of White House banter seems especially appropriate right now. Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman waxing philosophical on the Blacks, the Mexicans, Archie Bunker, the Greeks, the Romans, etc.

Pruning Shears: Attention Peter G. Peterson and our other newly minted paragons of fiscal probity: A virtue just recently embraced is no virtue at all

The Left Coaster: Anthem gets flagged

Imagine Lou Dobbs's head exploding when he hears this. But seriously, this will have profound effects on our economy:

Emigration from Mexico to the U.S. dropped 13% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, with more Mexicans leaving the U.S. than coming in. Indonesian authorities expect 60,000 or more citizens to be sent home from Malaysia, South Korea and other wealthy neighbors this year, as immigrant workers lose their jobs. Tens of thousands of Indians are washing their hands of Dubai as jobs there dry up and work permits expire. And in the U.K., the number of registered workers coming from new European Union member nations like Poland and the Czech Republic dropped 55% in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter a year earlier.

A growing number of migrants are returning home to places as diverse as Nepal and Tajikistan, while many are deciding not to emigrate to begin with, says Dilip Ratha, an economist and migration expert at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., citing reports from ministries and embassies. Mr. Ratha calls this reverse migration "very new" and "unprecedented."

Such migratory shifts could have profound consequences for developed nations, especially in places where domestic populations aren't growing fast enough to fill jobs or pay for social needs. High-skill immigrants are an important source of tax revenue in some cities, and their kids fill the classrooms of universities and private schools. In the developing world, remittances sent home by migrant workers are also slowing, meaning less income -- and potentially, less growth.

Some analysts question whether the latest migration reversal will outlast the current recession, or turn out to be as big as migration experts predict. Many immigrants have worked hard to establish themselves in their adopted countries and will be unwilling to leave, even if jobs disappear. Others say the trend could be more long-lasting, especially if returning workers help give developing economies a boost or if rich-world economies take many years to recover.

Workers like Mr. González are going home voluntarily, betting that for all the problems back home, their native countries offer better options than the U.S. and Europe. Many developed economies are contracting, but some developing-world countries including China and India are still growing.

If you've been following the news, you know that U.S. officials are much more worried about the second and third wave of swine flu, which should hit here sometime in the fall. And if that happens - since we have so many people unemployed and without health insurance - I predict we will have people dying here, too:

"In Mexico, we are very unaccustomed to going to the hospital. Here, if someone has a cold or anything else, they buy something in the pharmacy, or they leave it be," Flores said. "This is why Mexicans are dying. Because we are very indecisive about going to a hospital until it's too late."

Several theories have emerged as to why all but one of the confirmed deaths from swine flu have occurred in Mexico. Much of it is speculation -- that Mexico City's 7,300-foot elevation exacerbates respiratory illnesses, that there may be a slight variation between the viral strain prevalent in Mexico and swine flu elsewhere, that Mexico is further along in disease transmission and other countries will eventually see severe cases.

But a critical factor, according to specialists here, is that flu victims have delayed checking into hospitals until their condition has deteriorated so much they cannot be saved. While medicines are plentiful and cheap at Mexican pharmacies, swine flu antiviral medication was often not available or prohibitively expensive.

"Some patients arrive late at the hospitals, and to a certain degree this is a problem of education," José Sifuentes-Osorio, an infectious-disease specialist at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, said in a radio interview Monday. "Many of our people, independent of their socioeconomic situation, self-medicate for three or four days, and they lose precious time."

What is clear about the outbreak is that the epicenter is Mexico City, a megalopolis of more than 20 million people where about a third of the population lives in poverty. As of April 30, when there were 397 confirmed swine flu cases, 285 of those people lived in Mexico City, according to the most recent available statistics from the Health Ministry. Of the 26 people it said had died of the virus, 20 lived in the capital.

This really needs to be heard to be believed. Boston-area radio talk show host Jay Severin was suspended this week for making highly inflammatory and racist remarks on his talk show about Mexicans. TYT's Cenk Uygur thinks the station didn't go far enough and Severin should lose his job:

As you heard in the video above, Severin has been suspended by WTKK-FM in Boston. But that is not nearly enough. If you don't get fired for this, what do you get fired for?

Here are just some of his prize quotes from the show:

"So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico - women with mustaches and VD - now we have swine flu."

He described Mexicans as "the world's lowest of primitives."

"When we are the magnet for primitives around the world - and it's not the primitives' fault by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives - I'm merely observing they're primitive."

"It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America."

"We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of criminaliens already here."

He also said that emergency rooms had "become essentially condos for Mexicans."

And on a 2004 broadcast, he compared Muslims to a fifth column in this country and said in response to a caller who thought people should reach out to Muslims: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."

But unfortunately calling for the murder of Muslim-Americans has become so commonplace and acceptable these days that he didn't even come close to getting fired for those comments. So, I guess he figured he had free reign to attack the other half of M&Ms.

Now before some of you start making a "Free Speech" martyr of Severin, be clear what free speech means. It does NOT mean that you have the right to spew any kind of ugly thought you have on public airwaves. It means that the government cannot curtail your right to speak your mind. It doesn't mean that you do not have to deal with the repercussions of what you say. In this case, Severin's boss is not the government and they must assume the responsibility for allowing such unmitigated hate on the air. Avoiding Godwin references, how similar was Severin's rant to Radio Rwanda? Is that the kind of allusions with which WTKK wants to be associated?

Human Events, a ridiculously-conservative political magazine, recently reported, “Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S."

It’s hard to understand exactly what the right is arguing here, but apparently the idea is that the free-trading Bush administration wants to sell out U.S. interests and let Mexicans move products and people through the American Heartland, while bypassing Teamsters on the coasts. Or something. It’s hard to keep up with conservative conspiracy theories.

Yesterday, Christopher Hayes at The Nation tackled the subject, debunked the myths, and connected the bizarre ideas to domestic fears over globalization.

Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts. […]

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Well, sure, if you’re going to let facts get in the way of perfectly good demagoguery, the existence of the highway project might matter.

Empire Burlesque:  Hype v. Hyderabad.

At MaxSpeak, Max Sawicky’s proposal for an “intelligent immigration policy.”  At No Comment, a less intelligent but more modest proposal from Glenn Beck: convert Mexicans into cheap alternative fuel.

All Spin Zone: The Fairness Doctrine is still dead.

Lukery Land: A short course in scandal management, from Bandar Bush to Sibel Edmonds.

Pandagon: Most white people would charge a cool million to give up TV forever – but they’d be willing to switch races for ten grand or less.  (Has Clarence Thomas switched already?)

If you go to church on Sunday / And cabaret on Monday, join the Blogswarm Against Theocracy.

Guest blogger Simbaud will go to bed hungry tonight . . . unless you help.  Send your leftover infoscraps to: Simbaud AT gmail DOT com.