[h/t Media Matters]

I give Jennifer Korn credit for trying to dance around Lou Dobbs' intractable bias when it comes to how he refers to undocumented workers. Korn appeared on Dobbs' show Friday to explain why the Hispanic Leadership Network is trying to get Republicans to tone down their use of the term "illegals" when referring to undocumented workers.

In what could possibly be the most hilarious moment in the interview, Dobbs confronts Korn about her assertion that the term is 'tossed around' as an ad hominem attack on Hispanics without regard to why they aren't documented and are in this country.

DOBBS: Who are these fools using the term "illegals" in ways you think they just throw it around?

Gosh, Lou, I don't know. Maybe it was that guy letting go with a not-that-long-ago rant against the DREAM Act. Or maybe it was that guy who spent years hatemongering on CNN? Then again, perhaps it was the guy who used the term "illegals" all the time and acted like some high-and-mighty patriot while hiring undocumented immigrants to work for him?

In my best Dana Carvey Church Lady voice...Who could it be, who could it be? Could it be...SATAN? Or maybe just Lou Dobbs.

Bad things seem to happen when voters put social-engineering wingnuts in charge. Maybe they should think about that:

A study by the Georgia Agriculture Department of the state farm workforce shows that finding legal employees with the skill and desire to do labor-intensive harvesting is extremely difficult.

The reasons, says a report released Tuesday of the study’s findings, include the complexity and expense of government programs intended to help farmers employ guest workers, and the physically demanding nature of many agricultural jobs.

The Agriculture Department undertook the study after Georgia’s legislators passed a measure that targeted undocumented immigrants. The state General Assembly asked the agency to conduct a study of immigration's role in the agricultural industry, which the report described as “the state’s top economic driver.”

Farmers participating in the study said they have suffered roughly $10 million in crop losses because of the law, which many say has driven away workers.

So that's the Texas miracle: Pass the buck to the federal government, and then attack the federal government for spending too much money!

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Texas Gov. Rick Perry has asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for nearly $350 million to cover the costs incurred detaining illegal immigrants in state prisons and county jails.

In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Perry criticized the federal government hasn't been doing enough to secure the border with Mexico, thereby allowing illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. and use taxpayer-funded resources, including prisons and jails. It's a claim the Republican governor has made many times before.

The letter was dated Aug. 10, three days before Perry formally announced he is running for president.

Reached after-hours Friday by phone, DHS spokesman Matthew Chandler said he wasn't in position to comment and said he could not confirm that the DHS had even received the letter.

Perry has been criticized by some fellow conservatives as being too lenient on illegal immigration issues. Unlike fellow GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann, Perry does not think the U.S. should build a wall spanning the entire Mexican border. Perry also has supported discounted tuition rates for the children of illegal immigrants at Texas universities, and he has said Arizona's tough-on-immigration law wouldn't be right for Texas.

In his two-page letter to Napolitano, Perry described the formula he used to determine the costs, including $94.4 million to cover the costs incurred by county jails.

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In yet another example of how wingnut politicians act without thinking of the logical consequences, Georgia Republicans passed a law that's leaving their agricultural industry in sad shape:

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

And you know, here's where the chickens really come home to roost. Politicians act as if undocumented immigrants contribute nothing to the nation's economy, when the truth is, they do damned hard and dirty work that Americans consider beneath them:

The first batch of probationers started work last week at a farm owned by Dick Minor, president of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. In the coming days, more farmers could join the program.

So far, the experiment at Minor's farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor's farm.

"Those guys out here weren't out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, `Bonk this, I ain't with this, I can't do this,'" said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. "They just left, took off across the field walking."

Mendez put the probationers to the test last Wednesday, assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers.

"It's not going to work," Mendez said. "No way. If I'm going to depend on the probation people, I'm never going to get the crops up."

You'd think that someone would figure out that undocumented laborers working for crap wages are what keeps food prices low enough for the entire nation. But then, you'd be assuming that these showboating politicians are smart enough to think of anything that can't fit on a bumper sticker.

::Headdesk:: Florida state house candidate Marg Baker has some not-so-new ideas for how to handle illegal immigrants:

“I was just a little girl in Miami, and they built camps for the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal,” Baker said. “They put them in the camps and they shipped them back. We can do that. We can do E-Verify. We must stop them.”

In an interview with Salon (where she might have had an opportunity to clarify in a good way)), she elaborated:

"We can ship them out to the middle of the country and put up high walls and leave them there," said Marg Baker, the middle-aged real estate broker vying for the Republican nomination in the state's 48th district, north of Tampa.

And she gets even more specific later on:

Asked if what she had in mind was more like the Japanese internment camps of the World War II era, Baker said, "something like that. But unfortunately in the Japanese camps they detaineed American citizens. The only ones I want to detain are the ones who are illegal."

She added, "You've gotta have places for them to eat and sleep and breathe fresh air. It can be a tent city ... You don't want to make them too comfortable or they'll want to come back."

Funny, I feel that way about teabaggers. Let's round 'em all up and drop them into the middle of Kansas, in tent cities, because we don't want them too comfortable or they'll want to multiply.

The acrid odor of hate oozes from her words onto my screen. Republicans -- teabaggers in particular -- are intentionally using immigration as a way to stoke up race hate in advance of the midterms, hoping that it will distract from the real issue, which is their systematic destruction of our economy when they had power, and their hope to be able to tear down what progress has been made in the last two years.

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I’m sincerely grateful for President Obama’s national address last week on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. Like the president, I want to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to finalize legislation that fixes our broken immigration system.

If the Republican Party doesn’t want to cooperate on a reform bill, Democrats should move forward regardless. The American people want action, and they want results. If all the opposition intends to do is chant “amnesty” over and over in an attempt to scare us out of passing a bill, they may as well just get out of the way. We’re ready to move on immigration reform, and I call on everyone who cares about border safety, the rule of law, and the economy to join us.

I hope you’ll join us too. Please click here to sign my petition in support of comprehensive reform.

We need a bill that ensures safe borders, holds undocumented immigrants accountable, and creates a rigorous process for acquiring earned legal status, as HR 4321 currently does. I’m happy to hear the president talk so clearly about why we can’t kick this can any further down the road. We can’t leave millions of people in permanent limbo. A rigorous process for bringing them into the legal system, the employment system and the tax system will benefit not only these people individually but the nation as a whole.

We need a serious approach to this issue. Deporting 11 million people is unrealistic and would destroy the fabric of this country. Anyone who says otherwise is not living in the real world. Demagogues in the Republican Party, and their Democratic allies, will say this is about amnesty and open borders. No matter how many times they repeat it, it won’t be true. No one who understands the issue believes we can just dig trenches, point guns at the border and live in fear the rest of our lives. We need legal, social, economic and political reforms to truly make immigration work in this country, and we need them now.

Please sign my petition in support of comprehensive immigration reform. Let’s make our voices heard as Washington turns its attention to this crucial issue.

The president made clear in his speech last week that immigration reform is a matter of political courage. He’s absolutely right about that. As Congress and the White House craft a legislative proposal that sets up meaningful steps individuals need to take to get right with the law, in addition to addressing important border safety questions, it will become clear to the American people who’s trying to fix this problem and who’s obstructing progress for short-term political gain. We can’t let them win this one.

UPDATE :John Amato:

Blue America is supporting Rep. Grijalva in the upcoming election and you can find him on our special "One America" act blue page here. He's been very strong in his attempt to overturn SB1070 when so many others in Arizona have not.