Republicans have long touted their candidates' family values. Now, that goes double for the New York GOP. As Huffington Post among others noted this morning, Staten Island Republicans have nominated the disgraced Vito Fossella to run for his old House seat in 2010. Apparently, having a secret second family is no barrier to a second chance for today's Republican Party.

According to the Staten Island Advance, party leaders of the executive committee voted 23-4 to nominate Fossella just days after he claimed he would not seek his old seat. Party chairman Jim Friscia said of the two-family man, "It is my firm belief that [Fossella] is the strongest candidate we can field." For his part, former Fossella mentor Guy Molinari lamented:

"I think the status of the Republican Party on Staten Island has reached a new low tonight."

That's saying a lot.

After all, Fossella's 2008 DWI arrest led to the stunning admission that he had a second family in Virginia. As the New York Daily News reported two years ago:

He's the baby daddy!

Disgraced Staten Island Rep. Vito Fossella admitted Thursday he fathered a 3-year-old love child in an illicit affair with the woman who rescued him from a Virginia drunk tank...

New details about the congressman's double life have emerged. Fay's neighbors said he was a regular visitor to her townhouse - often taking strolls with his second family.

Fossella's resurrection couldn't come at a worse time for the national Republican Party. It not only comes just two days after the GOP's hand-picked candidates were drubbed in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, but the same week that Indiana Rep. Mark Souder resigned over his affair with a staffer.

Then again, the sin of adultery has proven to be just a minor bump in the road to national prominence for leading Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, David Vitter, Mark Sanford and John Ensign.

Nevertheless, Fossella's dual lives weren't the only reasons some observers doubted a second run for office. The New York Observer noted that Fossella's district will likely be redrawn in 2012. And posing nearer term problems, as TPM suggested, a possible embezzlement scandal involving Fossella's campaign committee could yet derail his return to Capitol Hill.

Regardless, Vito Fossella has the backing of the values voters of the GOP.

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

UPDATE: As TPM notes, "The full county committee still has to ratify the nomination and will meet next week."

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I've been reporting for a long time on the many ways that the immigration debate has served as a critical nexus in the intersection between right-wing extremism and mainstream conservatism.

Last weekend, Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- the quasi-fascist chief law-enforcement officer of Arizona's Maricopa County, currently under DOJ investigation for his refusal to abide by court orders and his rampant racial profiling -- provided us with a crystalline example.

Because we got to see a classic case of someone in a position of real power lending the authority of his office to the empowerment of far-right radicals -- unintentionally, perhaps (though not likely), but with the same result regardless.

On Saturday, May 2, several thousand people came out to march in protest of Arpaio's increasingly thuggish tactics.

And as is often the case with such events, there was a little knot of neo-Nazis out there to counter-protest. This meant they were out there to support Arpaio.

The first part of the above video is taken from footage shot by one of these counter-protesters. A little ways in, you'll see a black Cadillac pull up containing none other than Sheriff Joe himself, who has decided to stop by and say hello to his supporters. He lets one of them pose for a picture.

As it happens, the young man posing for him is none other than Thomas Coletto, aka "Vito Lombardi" -- who, as Stephen Lemons reports, is not only the local leader of a neo-Nazi outfit, but was also busted for burglary in a supposed "Columbine"-type plot two years ago.

After posing with Arpaio, Coletto posted the shot on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.

And it's not as if Arpaio recoiled and hurried on when he figured out who he was talking to. You can see in the video he pulls over and shakes hands with someone in group standing with a Confederate flag.

The rest of the video is compiled from other footage available on YouTube, particularly the work of 287gGots2go, who let us see what this little clutch of white nationalists was like from the other side of the camera.

I think it tells everything we need to know about who Sheriff Arpaio counts on for his support. It also tells us everything we need to know about how these people feel empowered enough to come crawling out from under the rocks beneath which they usually hide.

Dan Weiss at Imagine 2050 has more.