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(29 Luces - New faces of Mexican Indie . .si se puede!)

Further evidence that music is the universal language, 29 Luces comes from Mexico. They've been together since 2005, have one album out and I would bet you anything you've never heard of them, right?

Well, neither had I until a few years ago when I went exploring on MySpace and hit the browse icon and became a fan less than a minute later.

Aside from their album Sentado En Una Estrella (which isn't available in the States as far as I know, but is available via Amazon.com) they've been putting out some new material of which this track, El Dia es Hoy is one.

As always, check this band out. Their MySpace page is the best bet at the moment, as some of their other links don't go anywhere. I'll put some of their other material up in the coming weeks.

But for now . . .

(Sentado En Una Estrella - if you see it, grab it)

Esquire: Drug War Facts: America's prohibition of narcotics may be costing more lives than Mexico's — and nearly enough dollars for universal health care

Angry Bear: Gang of Six, Regular Order & the Johnson Treatment

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Alas, a blog: Crazy for Cryin', Crazy for Tryin'...

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Reporter urged lynching...JoeNBC...Pentagon screening war reporters...WSJ ethics...Grandaddy of Hate Radio back on the air...Kurtz: In the tank AND stupid...Bringing down Beck...And his"Defenders"...Does anyone actually edit the WaPo?...'Oh No He Didn't'...NPR boosts private health insurers...Alaska Daily notes Levi Johnston Tell-All...

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Glenn Beck wants everyone to rest assured he's not a complete nutcase. He's not a fan of state secession, after all!

Beck: Did you catch the New York Times this weekend? [Giggles weirdly.] They published the third -- count it, three -- the third op-ed in the New York Times blaming Bill O'Reilly and me, or Fox News in general, of spreading hate and inspiring people like the killer of Dr. Killer, uh, Tiller, in Kansas. Also, we were the inspiration apparently for the guy at the Holocaust Museum last week.

You know, there are groups out there that preach hate and violence and racial violence. There are groups out there so fed up they want to secede from the union. But we ain't one of them!

Hmmmm. An interesting denial. There's only one problem with it: Beck was downright enthusiastic about Texas secession two months ago when he interviewed Chuck Norris:

GLENN: Chuck, you live in Texas.

NORRIS: Yes, I do.

GLENN: Somebody asked me this morning, they said, you really believe that there's going to be trouble in the future. And I said, if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country, which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower.

NORRIS: It was slower, yeah.

GLENN: Americans will, they just, they won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up. And they said, where's that going to come from? And I said Texas, it's going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that, Chuck, or not?

NORRIS: Oh, yeah. You know, Texas is a republic, you know. We could actually --

GLENN: It was a country before it was a state.

NORRIS: Yeah, we could break off from the union if we wanted to.

GLENN: You do, you call me.

NORRIS: Oh, yeah.

If the people who call for state secession are complete nutbags, then why does Beck keep featuring on his show his good buddy Chuck Norris? The guy who wrote this:

On Glenn Beck's radio show last week, I quipped in response to our wayward federal government, "I may run for president of Texas."

That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government. ...

... I'm not saying that other states won't muster the gumption to stand and secede, but Texas has the history to prove it.

Of course, Beck is busy making this claim and running far far away from the right-wing nutcases whose theories he spent much of his first couple of months at Fox promoting.

Because heaven forfend that anyone should look at Beck's proclamation after the Holocaust Museum shooting that "the pot in America is boiling" and start figuring out who turned up the temperature.

Dr. Slammy at Scholars and Rogues has a great post on the phoninness of the "lone wolf"/"isolated incidents" meme that seems to be all the rage on the right these days.

Most of us are familiar with James Dobson's Focus on the Family outfit, since they've played a major role in promoting the religious right's positions for the past decade and more nationally: "The group supports the teaching of "traditional family values". It advocates school sponsored prayer and supports corporal punishment. It strongly opposes abortion, so-called militant feminism, homosexuality, pornography, and pre-marital and extramarital sexual activity."

Now, Michael Reynolds at JulyDogs has a series of posts detailing how FoF's influence is spreading south of the border too -- and it isn't pretty:

On Saturday an internal intelligence report on La Familia from the Mexican justice department surfaced in Milenio, bringing the news that the faith-based cartel grounds its indoctrination program on the writings of macho Christian author and veteran Focus On The Family senior fellow John Eldredge, who now heads Ransomed Hearts Ministries in Colorado Springs.

There are four separate references to Eldredge in the Mexican intelligence memo on La Familia. The cartel has conducted a three-year recruitment and PR campaign across Michoacan featuring thousands of billboards and banderas carrying their evangelical message and warnings. La Familia is known for tagging its executions and other mayhem as “la divina justica”–divine justice.

The report says La Familia leader, Nazario Gonzalez Moreno aka El Loco o More Chayo (”The Craziest”) has made Eldredge’s books required reading for La Familia and has paid rural teachers and National Development Education members to circulate the Colorado-based evangelical’s writings throughout the Michoacan countryside.

Reynolds goes on to cite Christian blogger Tim Challies:

John Eldredge became a major player in the evangelical world with the release of The Sacred Romance which he co-authored with Brent Curtis (who has since died). Following The Sacred Romance he wrote Wild at Heart, Waking The Dead, The Journey of Desire and more recently, Epic. I have read all of these except for Waking The Dead and The Journey of Desire. Eldredge’s books are targeted primarily at men and his writings have great appeal for men, many of whom feel that society has forced them to be like Mr. Rogers – harmless and just a little effeminate. Eldredge encourages men to be real men – to head to the wilderness and be the rugged warriors we all want to be if we look deep inside ourselves. Eldredge continually writes about William Wallace of Braveheart or Maximus, the main character in Gladiator – real manly men.”

As Reynolds explores in two follow-up posts, the way this has translated on the ground in Mexico is a wave of violence directed against not merely rival drug gangs, but also anyone who fails to live up to its version of "masculine Christianity":

“La Familia doesn’t kill for money, doesn’t kill women, doesn’t kill innocent people. It only kills those who deserve to die. Everyone should know this: Divine justice.”–message left with five severed heads on the dance floor of the Sol y Sombra nightclub in Uruacan, Michoacan, September 6, 2006.

... From all available information so far, it appears that La Familia has developed into a faith-based right-wing populist social movement emanating from and orchestrated by an organization that happens to be a well-armed, well-financed violent criminal enterprise.

... La Familia is strongly pro-family (and all that that implies) and requires its members to abstain from alcohol and drugs. There is an indoctrination program all La Familia recruits must go through that inculcates “ personal values, ethical and morlal principles consistent with the purposes of the organization.” Last year La Familia brought in two motivational speakers to lecture its members. The group is hierarchic and maintains a strict top-down emotional control of its members.

Think of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, only with more money and firepower and you get the idea.

So maybe Tony Perkins' bashing of Dr. George Tiller just prior to his assassination was not an accident after all.

Just don't tell Glenn Beck or Michelle Malkin. Their heads will explode.

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May 28, 2009 CNN

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Crazy Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- who is currently under investigation by the Justice Department for his wanton racial profiling as the chief law-enforcement officer in Maricopa County, Arizona -- was on Neil Cavuto's Fox News program yesterday to talk about the swine flu outbreak and how it's being caused by illegal immigrants. (For some reason, Cavuto didn't bother to mention the DOJ investigation.)

Cavuto: Should we close the border. There are many folks who say, Enough is enough, let's close the border.

Arpaio: Well, I'll tell you one thing right now, we should be stopping and inspecting and searching every vehicle coming across that border. Washington is not talking about all the illegal immigrants coming into our country, they're talking about checking at the airports and at the ports. Why are they not talking about all the illegals that circumvent that area coming into the United States?

[snip]

Arpaio: I'm going to say it again: My deputies arrested 900 human smugglers. Guess what? Ninety percent have come through the Mexico bordering states into our country. It takes seven days to come from Mexico City to our county -- seven days' incubation period. We have 28,000 people we checked into jails. We have TB, we have chicken pox, and a majority have come from south of the border. So we have a problem with this illegal immigration.

Cavuto: So if you're right, and this disease takes awhile to incubate and show itself, you could have many, many more cases than are being reported now.

Arpaio: Yeah, but once again, I'm saying, I'm not just blaming illegal immigration. I'm concerned Washington is not talkin' about it! Why don't they talk about all those that evade the checkpoint? Someone should be checking them out!

Cavuto: And you don't think we're doing enough of that.

Arpaio: Nobody's talkin' about it! Nobody's bringing up the illegal immigration and all those hundreds of thousands who sneak into our country that could be diseased.

Yeah, nobody's talking about it -- except every right-wing nutcase on the planet!

Media Matters has much more, plus a video:

Continue reading »

We should know soon whether American-owned pig farms were the source of this outbreak:

Reporting from Mexico City -- With the death toll climbing, Mexican authorities at the center of an international swine flu epidemic struggled Monday to piece together its lethal march, with attention focusing on a 4-year-old boy and a pig farm.

The boy, who survived the illness, has emerged as Mexico's earliest known case of the never-before-seen virus, Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said Monday. It provides an important clue to the unique strain's path.

The boy lived near a pig farm run by a U.S.-Mexican company, Granjas Carroll, in the municipality of Perote, in Veracruz state on the Gulf of Mexico. He contracted the disease on April 2, Cordova said, one of a group of residents who came down with what was at the time labeled a particularly bad case of the flu.

Only one sample from the group, that belonging to the boy, was preserved. It was retested after other cases of the new strain were confirmed elsewhere in the country, Cordova said. The boy had the same disease. It is unknown how many more of the hundreds of people who fell sick in Perote also were infected by the strain.

In an ominous disclosure, officials said the first confirmed fatality of the disease, a 39-year-old woman from an impoverished state neighboring Veracruz, worked as a door-to-door census-taker and may have had contact with scores of people.

In Perote, residents of the hamlet known as La Gloria have complained since mid-March that contamination from the pig farm was tainting their water and causing respiratory infections. In one demonstration in early April, they carried signs with pictures of pigs crossed out with an X and the word "peligro" -- danger. Residents told reporters at the time that more than half the town's 3,000 inhabitants were sick and that three children under the age of 2 had died.

Local health officials mobilized when the outbreak was first reported, but they gave a different account: The infection may have started with a migrant farmer who returned from work in the U.S. and gave the disease to his wife, who in turn passed it on to other women in the community.

Granjas Carroll, which claims to be Mexico's leading pig farm at a million head a year, issued a statement Monday saying none of its employees had shown any signs of illness and noting that the sick are people who had no contact with its pigs. It is but one of numerous farms in the region.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization announced Monday that it was sending a team of experts to inspect pig farms in Mexico. The agency's chief veterinary officer, Joseph Domenech, said the teams would attempt to determine whether the new strain was circulating among pigs and then trace linkage to human populations.

A report this morning says a Smithfield Farms operation in Mexico is the likely source.

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Leave it to Pitchfork Pat Buchanan to take a seemingly rational discussion of America's relationship with Mexico on Andrea Mitchell's MSNBC show this morning and turn it into a Latino-bashing bigotfest:

Buchanan: Mexico is the greatest foreign-policy crisis I think America faces in the next 20-30 years. Who is gonna care, Andrea, thirty years from now whether a Sunni or a Shi'a is in Baghdad, or who's ruling in Kabul? We're going to have 135 million Hispanics living in the United States by 2050, heavily concentrated in the Southwest. The question is whether we're going to survive as a country.

Rrrrrright. I gather he's been listening to Glenn Beck.

Actually, this is hardly the first time such a pronouncement has come out of Buchanan's mouth. Indeed, his racism has become so open that it remains Exhibit A in calling BS on the right-wing claim that liberal political correctness has driven all such sentiments from the public square.

It's almost like he's the crazy Bircherite uncle no one wants to talk to at the family picnic, because you know he's just going to burst out eventually with some rude display of bigotry. And sure enough ...

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Watch Glenn Beck much and you're going to get whiplash.

Like his show yesterday on Fox News: Shortly after appealing to the public not to get all hysterical and overwrought about the AIG Bonus Scandal, Glenn Beck got all hysterical and overwrought with Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association about Obama's evil plot to take away our guns.

Of course, this back-and-forth tone shift comes on the heels of Beck's overtly populist appeals to torches and pitchforks that have largely characterized his first couple of months working the audiences at Fox -- alongside the apocalyptic shrieking, weeping, and teeth-gnashing.

But the gun-grabbing segment yesterday was also a big about-face for Beck: Beck and LaPierre worked themselves into a fine frenzy over President Obama's eeeeevil plans for taking away Americans' guns -- no doubt just the first steps that will eventually lead to eradicating the Second Amendment, rounding up gun owners and placing them in FEMA camps, and installing a blue-helmeted United Nations dictatorship in America.

What's inspiring the recent gun moves? Drug-gang violence on the Mexican border. Yet for much of the past month, Glenn Beck has been bugging his eyes out and flecking his camera lenses with spittle, warning Americans about the doom about to descend on them because of the violence on that border. So when the government pays attention to the problem and tries to find practical solutions, Beck attacks that.

A Fox News piece outlines the issue, as the wingnuts see it:

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What exactly is up with Fox News' fetish about warning kids to stay away from Mexico?

Bill O'Reilly pushed this story last night, and his vision of the scene in Mexico, with a bunch of tough Tony Montana-style drug lords hanging out in every smoky den, was about what you'd expect from the author of Those_Who_Trespass. Which is to say, largely bereft of reality. His guest -- who clearly knows her way around these scenes far better than BillO -- was incredulous: "Where do you get this stuff?" she asks at one point.

Well, he's probably getting at least some of it from his own Fox News operation. Indeed, between Glenn Beck's kookoo for Cocoa Puffs ranting episodes warning of a looming apocalypse coming our way from south of the border, and the rest of the Fox team's reportage on events there, the cable channel is becoming one big running ad: "Mexico is Scary!!! Stay Away!!! Stay Away!!!"

Here are just some of the stories that have run at Fox in the past few weeks:

Students Warned About Spring Break Travel to Mexico

U.S. State Department Issues Travel Alert for Mexico

Colleges warn students about Mexico travel

College Students' Spring Break Hopes Dashed by Mexico Drug Violence

U.S. Says Threat of Mexican Drug Cartels Approaching 'Crisis Proportions'

If Violence Escalates in Mexico, Texas Officials Plan to Be Ready

Will Mexico Bring Down the U.S.?

What Happens to the U.S. if Mexico Collapses?

Mexican Drug Cartels Armed to the Hilt, Threatening National Security

Mexico is a big country. It is also a lovely country. The only place that's currently unsafe is the border region right now. Stay away from border towns, and don't go looking for drugs, and you'll be fine.

In fact, it's grotesquely irresponsible to smear and damage the tourism business for the rest of Mexico because of those problems. You'd think Fox News was trying to hurt them or something.

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Friday morning on CNN Kiran Chetry spoke with Arizona's AG Terry Goddard about the raging drug war taking place along our southern border and how U.S. gun and drug laws are perpetuating the violence.

Since George Bush allowed the assault weapons ban to expire, the gun smuggling trade in the U.S. has skyrocketed and many of these weapons are ending up in the hands of Mexican drug lords and are responsible for thousands of murders. The right has been going bonkers, warning Democrats want to take everyone's guns from them and turn us into a nation of dopers, but it's high time they admit that our gun laws are aiding drug cartels and making it possible for them to get more drugs into our country.

Goddard points out that the vast majority of the drug cartel's income comes from the sale of marijuana which begs the questions - is it time to reinstate the assault weapons ban and legalize pot? Both President Obama and AG Eric Holder have said they want to reinstate the assault weapon ban, hopefully they will be successful. As for the legalization of pot, I think the time has come.