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Lou Dobbs was interviewed on the Spanish-language network Telemundo yesterday by Maria Celeste (h/t Andrea Nill), and she cut quickly to the point:

Celeste: You mention that this criticism and this perception, misperception of yourself, it's only in the extreme, ah, extreme left, and that might be the case in the Anglo market, but trust me, in the Hispanic world, you are viewed by many, by many people as the No. 1 enemy -- maybe because of the many inflammatory and misleading statements about undocumented immigrants that you've made throughout the years. And let me go with the first one.

The most outrageous one was blaming immigrants for a dramatic rise in leprosy cases in the United States, stating that in three years, the cases of leprosy had suddenly jumped to 7,000, and that this was largely due to the influx of undocumented immigrants. By the way, according to the United States Department of Health [and Human Services], 7,000 cases of leprosy were reported over thirty years, not three, which is a big difference.

But even after that, that was proven wrong, what you had said, you stood behind your reporting, insisting that it was accurate. Why was that?

Dobbs: No no. Let's be very clear. For one, I did not stand behind that reporting. In fact, we corrected that reporting.

And secondly, in fairness to me, if you will, I never said a word about leprosy and undocumented immigrants, as you put it. My correspondent on our broadcast ad-libbed it, and as you are very familiar with the process of an edited report, and at the end of that she referred to a source with whom she had been speaking, and she said at the end of that report -- ad-libbed it, that is, without script or preparation, but simply said it -- that there were thousands of people on the registry for leprosy in the United States and those had shot up dramatically over the course of three years.

Dobbs is just baldfacedly lying. He did indeed defend that reporting, he did not correct it at any time, and Romans' didn't simply say "those had shot up dramatically over the course of three years," she clearly indicated that they had skyrocketed from 900 to 7,000 cases -- a grotesquely false claim.

Let's roll the tape, first back to April 14, 2005, when Dobbs first trotted out the phony leprosy story.

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[Video from BlueStemPrairie, at their YouTube page.]

The teabaggers are getting ready for the next round of wingnuttery against the Obama administration. It sure looks like they lost on health-care reform, but they have already been organized for a long time around the issue of immigration, so they are ready and rarin' to go careening off the far-right cliff.

This weekend, the nativist right-wingers at ALIPAC and the National Policy Institute organized a series of "Tea Parties Against Amnesty.

However, at the rally in Minneapolis, the demonstrators got punk'd by a young man who called himself "Robert Erickson".

"Erickson" got up and delivered a rant against European immigration. At first the crowd was whooping and hollering as he talked about the rights of "real Americans" -- but then it gradually tapered off as he went on and they realized they'd been had.

Here's the speech:

Hi, my name is Robert Erickson and I’m really excited to be here. Its people like all of you, and events like this that make our country great! Give yourselves a round of applause!

I just want to talk about a couple themes this afternoon because I love this country and I want to see America be the best place it can be.

Mr. Gutierrez is getting ready to propose an immigration bill in just a few short days, and we have to make sure he knows that we want a bill that's tough on immigration. Now is the time for us to stand up and make our voices heard!

In Minneapolis, where I’m from, we have a huge immigrant population that’s been causing a number of problems. With the economy in recession, and so many people getting laid off, and unable to find work, immigrants should not be competing for the few jobs that are out there. It's just not fair to the folks who have a claim to this land and the right to be here. All across America, they are contributing to the flooding of our job markets making it hard for Americans to find jobs. Well, I'm fed up, and it's time to let our politicians know that enough is enough, and we're not gonna take it any more!

We need to secure our borders to protect our country. We need to restore order and put an end to the anarchy that's sweeping the nation. We need tougher immigration laws to make sure that we send these people back where they came from. We need to protect the sovereignty of the real Americans. We need to hold our politicians accountable.

It's no secret that with an invasion of immigrants comes waves of crime. We see them involved in massive theft, in murder, and bringing diseases like smallpox, which is responsible for the death of millions of Americans. These aren't new problems, though -- they have been going on for hundreds of years, and continue to this day.

I say it's time for us to say enough is enough! Are you with me? Are you with me? Let's send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don't care if they are Polish, Irish, English, Italian, or Norwegian! European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinous crimes in the history of the world, including genocide and slavery! It's time to restore the sovereignty of people native to this land!

I want more workplace raids, starting with the big banks downtown. There are thousands of illegals working in those buildings, hiding in their offices, and taking Dakota jobs. Let's round them up and ship them out. Then we need to hit them at home where they sleep. I don’t care if we separate families, they should have known better when they came here illegally!

If we aren't able to stand up to these European immigrants, who can we stand up to? We need to send every one of them back home, right now.

Thank you very much, and we'll see you in the streets!

Columbus Go Home! Columbus Go Home! Columbus Go Home!

Not surprisingly, the organizers were pissed. Sally Jo Sorensen at BlueStemPrairie was there to watch, and she reported that some of the nativists started getting violent:

Most of the MINN-SIR supporters were slow to catch the satire, and so the cheering from that side of the crowd took a while to subside. As they realized they'd been punked, they stood in a cold, stunned silence, while the 30 or so counter-protesters urged Columbus to go home.

Unfortunately, some of the pro-MINN-SIR audience made up for what they lacked in humor through the use of violence. Both Danielson and I saw middle-aged men attack young protesters, knocking one off a bike before he started throwing punches at the young man.

Just as shocking was the reaction of the state police working the rally, who pushed back those being attacked, rather than those attacking the counter protesters.

Neither of us have ever witnessed violence at rallies and events we've attended in the past. The attacks formed a sharp counterpoint to Hendrycks' shrieked claims from the podium that MINN-SIR "patriots" had "respect" while the young protesters were rude.

I've been warning for awhile that there is a violent element already involved in the immigration debate, and when they become empowered by the "tea party" types, it's going to get ugly. Looks like the debate hasn't even started yet, and it already is.

If you thought the town-hall teabaggers went nuts over health-care reform, just wait.

[H/t Matt Ortega.]

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Recently, Kevin Ecker of the right-wing Minnesota superblog True North posted the following item:

Political activism at it's best is honest grassroots efforts by people finally fed up with lying politicians who decide to do something about an issue rather than just complain. We have a great example of that coming up here in Minnesota on the immigration issue.

On Saturday, July 11th at 2 PM, there will be a rally held at the Mower County Courthouse. It's located at 201 First Street NE, Austin, MN. This will be the second rally in a month at that location.

Basically Austin is a town that the residents feel has been devastated by illegal immigration, and a lone resident, Sam Johnson, finally got fed up. He organized the first rally despite being up against professionally organized counter protests by the likes of La Raza, Centro Campesino and various Marxist organizations bussed in from the cities.

So Sam Johnson and his supporters need your help to rally the people necessary to stand against illegal immigration. South Eastern Minnesota has become a battleground on this issue and the public needs to know that they don't have to just stand by and let their towns be overrun as a result of apathy from both Washington DC and St. Paul.

You can contact Sam Johnson by email : nsmsoutheastmn -at- gmail -dot- com

Now, note that e-mail address: Yep, that's "NSM Southeast MN" -- or "National Socialist Movement Southeast Minnesota." You'd think that would have been a little red flag for Kevin Ecker.

But it was up to Jeff Fecke at Moderate Left to point out that this is what Sam Johnson looks like when he goes out in public:

In case you’re wondering — and I doubt you are, but some people might not be able to view the picture — yes, that’s a guy wearing a neo-Nazi uniform. Because Sam Johnson isn’t just a hard-working white American who’s fed-up with illegal immigration. He’s a neo-Nazi, the head of the National Socialist Movement Southeast Minnesota.

Sally Jo Sorensen at BlueStemPrairie recently interviewed Johnson in a three-part series that's well worth reading for the insight you get into the white-supremacist mentality (Part 3 is here), but this outtake pretty much sums it up:

"Minorities should not be citizens," Johnson said, "only 100 percent true white Americans." He outlined his vision of a nation in which all people of color would be stripped of their citizenship, no matter how long their families had lived in the United States, and moved to communities that would be strictly delineated according to race.

People of African descent would live with other people of African descent, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, American Indians with American Indians, and "real Americans" with other "real Americans. "Real American" and non-citizen status would be determined be having had family living in the country for five generations or 50-70 years.

Only if non-whites broke the law would they be sent back to the country of their ancestors' origins, regardless of how long their families had lived in the United States. Of course, Johnson emphasized, this would dictate deporting all immigrants living here illegally.

"Minorities could have jobs, own homes, and enjoy their own culture," he said. They simply wouldn't be citizens of the United States, nor could they become citizens. They would have to keep separate.

Upon realizing what he had done, Ecker added the following note:

NOTE (10/27/09) : It has since been pointed out to me that Sam Johnson is, to put it lightly, a Neo-Nazi. Let me make it clear I do not endorse such a hate filled ideology and wish to express no endorsement of any such views.

At the time I thought Sam Johnson was merely a small time illegal immigration activist, mainly cause I've never heard of him. I'm not of a mind to assume the worst motivations of someone plus googling a name like "Sam Johnson" seemed an act of futility at best.

Knowing what I know now, no I would not have posted this and his entire event would have been forgotten, if not actively shunned.

Well, as Fecke observed:

This is why those of us on the left don’t buy it when the right claims that they’re not racist — because they are so very willing to embrace racists when it helps them. If Republicans want to stop being seen as the party of hate, they need to stop the hatred. Otherwise, they need to own the fact that a sitting Republican congresswoman is a contributor to a website that promoted a neo-Nazi hate rally, promotion that included sharing Sam Johnson’s email address with those looking to get involved. Only a party that found racism acceptable could be comfortable with that.

Indeed, as Phoenix Woman observed, it wasn't as if Ecker and his fellow Republicans shouldn't have known about Sam Johnson.

He has, after all, been in the Minnesota news a lot lately. For instance, earlier this month he led a protest in Minneapolis outside a local YWCA, which was holding a diversity seminar, that was attended only by Johnson and three of his fellow neo-Nazis -- and several hundred counter-protesters. As you can see in the video above (compiled from YouTube videos shot at the event), the crowd not only shouted them down, but followed them to their car, and chanted "Don't come back!" as they pulled away.

Continue reading »

Lou Dobbs has gone and done it again:

On his radio show -- broadcast from the anti-immigration organization Federation for American Immigration Reform's "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" legislative advocacy event -- Lou Dobbs interviewed WorldNetDaily staff reporter Jerome Corsi, who Dobbs described as "a pretty good guy to talk to" about immigration issues. Corsi is a consistent promoter of the conspiracy theory -- previously advanced by Dobbs -- that President Obama has yet to produce a valid birth certificate; the author of falsehood-laden books about Obama and Sen. John Kerry that Dobbs' CNN colleagues panned as "discredited;" and has a history of making bigoted comments, some of which he later apologized for.

The piece documents Corsi's long history of promoting conspiracy theories, including most recently the "birther" nonsense, but more famously the "Swift Boat" garbage that sank John Kerry's candidacy.

Perhaps even more germane is that, beyond the "birther" conspiracy theories, Corsi has most recently been promoting the theory that President Obama is planning to round up conservatives and put them in concentration camps.

This willingness to abet the most insane wingnuttery is yet another drop in the bucket of evidence that CNN needs to give Dobbs the boot if it ever hopes to salvage what little credibility it has left.

A new site called DropDobbs.com is a joint effort by various progressive organizations -- including Media Matters, America's Voice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Council of La Raza -- to demand CNN make the change:

Over the years, Lou Dobbs has consistently used his CNN platform to spread hatred and fear. He played a critical role in skewing the immigration reform debate in 2006, leading to the derailment of that effort, and his obsession with the issue of immigration and with defeating immigration reform continues unabated. Adding to his repertoire of hate and fearmongering, he has recently aligned himself with the “birther” conspiracists and their racially tinged attack on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. From his CNN platform, he has bolstered the claims of those on the fringe by asserting repeatedly that President Obama has failed to produce adequate proof that he was born in the United States. His recent focus on the birth certificate conspiracy issue has reinforced what immigration reform proponents have long known — that Dobbs has a long history of the worst kind of pandering by promoting hate and ethnic and racial division.

Timothy Karr at HuffPo has a thoughtful piece on what we can start to do to confront the flood of toxic garbage that is spewing out of right-wing media these days. Lou Dobbs is only one of the most prominent problems.

John Aravosis uncovers an amazing nugget in TIME Magazine. Apparently, there are Democrats who saw Rep. Joe Wilson yell "You Lie!" at the President of the United States and thought, "that guy has a point." And they happen to be the ones writing the health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee.

The controversy over Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's shouting out "You Lie!" at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn't benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. "We really thought we'd resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President's speech last night we wanted to go back and drill down again," said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Baucus later that afternoon said the group would put in a proof of citizenship requirement to participate in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

So many things wrong with this, starting with caving to an extremist. But it's worse than that on the policy end. The exchanges are just health insurance purchasing centers, like a Wal-Mart for insurance. You don't have to receive a subsidy to buy insurance on the exchanges; in fact, if your family makes over $88,000 a year, you can't be eligible for a subsidy, though you can still purchase there. What Conrad is saying is that he would make it illegal for a non-citizen to BUY something.

Not only that, but proof of citizenship laws, which we don't have in most states for voting, are onerous and disproportionately tilted away from the poor and the elderly, as well as potentially restrictive to legal immigrants with green cards, in this case. As the New York Times says today:

Should we take a harder line? Force people to prove citizenship in emergency rooms? That’s illegal, for good reason. Make verification requirements so onerous that not a single illegal immigrant slips through? Very expensive, and not smart. It would be highly likely to snag deserving citizens — like old people who don’t have their original birth certificates. And besides, we’ve tried that: A House oversight committee reviewed six state Medicaid programs in 2007 and found that verification rules had cost the federal government an additional $8.3 million. They caught exactly eight illegal immigrants.

In the case of an epidemic, like swine flu, should illegal immigrants go untreated so they can infect legal residents and American citizens?

Hard-line Republicans insist that they will fight for citizenship verification. They could, in theory, get the country to spend whatever it takes to do that and proudly report back to their voters. But there is a line beyond which antipathy to the undocumented can be damaging to those voters’ health, not to mention the federal budget. Mr. Wilson and his admirers seem to have crossed it.

Not to mention the fact that buckling to these demands will not get one Republican vote on any health care bill.

This is the Senate Finance bill, not the overall bill. But Democrats are so wishy-washy when it comes to, well, anything, that we actually could see this rotten, xenophobic, piss-poor policy in a bill supposedly designed to expand access to health care.

I know a lot of money has been flowing to Joe Wilson's opponent in 2010, but a far better use of those dollars would be to funnel them toward primary opponents for Kent Conrad and Max Baucus.

UPDATE: Conrad is now clarifying that there would be no federal subsidies, and requiring proof of citizenship would just be used to determine qualification for government assistance. Of course, you end up with the same problem, then; those without proper proof of ID would have trouble getting subsidies that could be available to them. The larger point is that there was no need to react to a teabagger yelling and screaming. This was already implicit in the bill, and allowed for the HHS Secretary to determine a best practice. This blunt instrument is not the way to do it, and makes Democrats look weak (but that's redundant).

UPDATE II: As this GAO report notes, checkpoint systems like Baucus and Conrad want were implemented under the Bush Administration to ensure undocumenteds didn't get on Medicaid, and for every $100 they spent, 14 CENTS in Medicaid savings were achieved. It's wasteful and spiteful!

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Last year a Norwegian news crew interviewed Shawna Forde while she was out on "patrol" for illegal border crossers in the vicinity of Arivaca, Arizona -- the same area where, less than a year later, she would be arrested for the cold-blooded murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father.

It's pretty chilling, particularly when she describes their activities in the desert:

And then there's the shot where you see her stick her gun down her pants. (For someone raised around guns in a shooting family, that only confirms her complete and utter dumbassery. What is it about Minuteman types who stick their guns down their pants? This is always the sign of someone too stupid to care whether they shoot off their dick or ass.)

In any event, this is all part of why, as Patrick Young at Long Island Wins notes, the Minutemen and their supporters are scrambling hard to get away their many long associations with Forde:

Shawna Forde, who allegedly cooked up the deadly plot to raise money for political action had close ties to Jim Gilchrist, one of the two founders of the Minutemen. His website had defended her against criticism from other anti-immigrant activists as recently as January of this year. Yet, if you go to his site today, pages that Google says listed her have been scrubbed.

Same thing with VDARE, the homepage of educated racism. The site had an article criticizing a newspaper that had called Forde's claims of having been abducted by aliens (Latino immigrants, not space monkeys) far-fetched. The page was scrubbed. It only exists as a Google cache and will soon disappear. Cowards. If you want to back up a woman her brother describes as a sociopathic liar you should at least leave your endorsement up when she is also shown to be a psychopathic murderer.

Young also adroitly observes:

Jeff Schwilk, the leader of the San Diego Minutemen, in his denial of involvement with Shawna Forde gave the most damning statement about her and his own armed militia: "I've been concerned about her and her impact on our movement... Irrational people with assault rifles at the border is a recipe for disaster."

Exactly what I've been saying since I first heard of the Minutemen.

Indeed. And the above video is ample testament to that fact.

Meanwhile, Chad Shue at the Examiner describes how Forde's extremism helped drive the formation of an organized civil-rights campaign to counter it in the Everett area in the form of the Snohomish County Citizens Committee for Human Rights.

The Colorado Independent points out that Tom Tancredo also had his representatives in attendance at Forde's 2007 "Immigration Summit" in Everett, where a letter was read from Tancredo sending his regrets for not being in attendance.

And Marc Cooper chimes in as well.

Of course, at this point, we're still wondering where the rest of the media are. The national reporting on this has been nearly nonexistent -- particularly at Fox.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, the media reaction under the reversed scenario: If this had been a Mexican drug gang that had murdered a white family in the desert, can you imagine how Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly would have handled it?

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Those upstanding nativists and xenophobes employed by the John Tanton Network -- and particularly the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was designated a hate group by the SPLC awhile back -- have been complaining vigorously about how unfairly they are being treated. Why, they have nothing to do with the manifest racism swirling around the immigration debate -- so they claim.

But the recent arrest of Minuteman offshoot leader Shawna Forde for the murder of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter -- part of a broader plan to rob drug dealers and use the money to finance their Minuteman operations -- has ripped the veneer off the fake walls these nativists use to pretend that they have nothing to do with the racists who seem to swell their ranks as though they belonged there naturally. (Funny thing, that.)

Back in 2006, you see, Forde appeared at a public "town hall" forum on immigration in Yakima, Wash., a central-Washington city whose main economy is agricultural, particularly apple orchards. As Jackie Mahendra at America's Voice notes, she was presented as a "spokesperson for FAIR" as well as the Minutemen.

As you can see from the video above, Forde was outrageously incendiary, accusing immigrants of bringing crime and disease to the state and costing taxpayers in health-care costs, particularly for their "anchor babies."

At one point, host Enrique Cerna asked Forde:

Cerna: Shawna, let me ask you about the issue of economics. You've heard constraints from growers, you know, that the apple harvest is very important in this state, particularly in this region. What do you say to the growers?

Forde: We've got a prison system. Let's utilize it.

She later wrapped up with this:

Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?

And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop -- we will start at the local level and work our way up -- we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.

However, it was unclear to me if Forde really was a FAIR representative or whether she had just lied about that, as seems to be her pattern in many instances.

But in untangling the puzzle, what emerged was a clear portrait of FAIR officials commingling freely with Minutemen and the many seedy characters who occupy their ranks -- so much so that what they become is a "respectable" front organization for a ragtag bunch of thuggish nativists.

Continue reading »

The nationwide surge in violence by right wing extremists has been making a lot of headlines lately, both in the blogosphere and the corporate media -- with Fox News doing its best to downplay the violence as isolated and perpetrated by lefties.

Now it appears that Shawna Forde, a rising star in the xenophobic, anti-immigrant militia movement has been arrested for her role in a home invasion that left two dead, including a 9 year old girl.

TUCSON, AZ (KOLD) - Pima County Sheriff's investigators have charged three people with a May 30 home invasion that left a father and 9-year-old girl dead.

Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola face murder, burglary and aggravated assault charges.

Investigators say the suspects broke into a home in Arivaca, shooting and killing 29-year old Raul Flores and his daughter Brisenia.

Investigators say Forde was the mastermind of the operation. She and Gaxiola are in the Pima county jail. Answering media questions while led out in handcuffs, both suspects denied responsibility for the deadly home invasion.

"This is a very unusual woman," said Clarence Dupnik, Pima County Sheriff. "I don't really know what goes on in her mind, but she is obviously a very evil person. If you look at her history closely, and you know what we know, she is, at best, a psychopath." Read on...

Forde, who is surrounded by numerous controversies, has been on the radars of both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League for some time now. Shawna is also supported by Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project -- who is also embroiled in controversies of his own.

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.

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Let's give Bill O'Reilly some credit: He's smart enough to recognize that the GOP's desire to try to tear down Sonia Sotomayor is a classic case of cutting one's nose off to spite what's left of your face.

Here's a political party, after all, that's caught in a death spiral of declining membership and vanishing power. One of the key reasons for that has been the sharp decline in Hispanic participation in the GOP -- a significant loss among the nation's fastest-growing ethnic component.

O'Reilly can see this, and discussed it in last night's Talking Points Memo segment. But he also thinks it's just a PR problem:

So Hispanic voters actually put Barack Obama in the White House, and the GOP needs some of them back, thus Republicans face a quandary.

This morning on ABC, conservative Ann Coulter pretty much defined the problem:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANN COULTER, CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR: Saying that someone would decide a case differently, better in fact, because she is a Latina rather than a white male, I mean, that statement is by definition racist. I'm not saying she's a racist, but the statement sure is.

DIANE SAWYER, "GOOD MORNING AMERICA" CO-HOST: Were you moved by the Hispanic breakthrough, Ann?

COULTER: Why aren't Democrats — why aren't they choking up over Clarence Thomas or Miguel Estrada? I mean, you know, come on, why are we all supposed to weep only when it's a liberal Hispanic or a liberal black?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Yes, indeed, Coulter does define the problem. So do Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. Their own bigotry has been on display so often, and so nakedly, that we already know where they're coming from. Coulter's performance -- including a flat refusal to offer even the smallest note of grace -- spoke for itself.

And how does it look to have the Right's leading bigots shouting "Racist!" at Sotomayor? Besides hilarious?

But O'Reilly didn't see it that way:

Ms. Coulter's point is true. Liberals gleefully attacked Clarence Thomas and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, but the media is now lurking, looking to pound any conservative who goes after Ms. Sotomayor. So the Republicans have a tough situation on their hands.

The judge is vulnerable, especially on affirmative action, and her racial tone on who has a better outlook on the law, minorities or whites. But to the Hispanic-American community, that might not matter much, especially considering the judge's background.

So according to O'Reilly, Hispanics aren't concerned about her alleged racism, because she's such a swell "life story." When actually, they're not concerned about it because she's not racist.

A little later, in discussing it with Dick Morris, O'Reilly described it again:

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Last week we reported on Sheriff Joe's recent photo op with a clutch of neo-Nazis who came out to counter-protest at a march held to raise a stink about Arpaio's racial-profiling ways.

Now Stephen Lemon, the Phoenix New Times reporter who dug much of this up, follows up with an amazing in-depth report on Arpaio and his associations with local white supremacists -- particularly an outfit called United for a Sovereign America.

USA is run by a fellow named J.T. Ready, whom you can see here, in the business suit:

You can read more about Ready here.

Lemon's story has a wealth of detail, but the most disturbing aspect is the extent to which he uncovers an actual operational relationship between Arpaio's office and these white supremacists:

Yet the sheriff's involvement with extreme hate groups is not incidental. The relationship has been prolonged and intentional, arguably helping him get re-elected last year in a county where much of the electorate is hostile toward Mexican immigrants.

Since 2007, Arpaio has appeared at nativist events, accepted awards from groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, welcomed U.S.A. leader Rusty Childress into his immigration sweep headquarters, spoken at nativist meetings frequented by neo-Nazis, and used petitions circulated by extremists to justify his immigration dragnets.

... This May 2 dalliance with Coletto and J.T. Ready wasn't the first time Arpaio has associated with the neo-Nazis. In March 2008, the sheriff spoke before a United for a Sovereign America meeting at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Sunnyslope, where U.S.A. affiliate Elton Hall was in attendance. Hall, 75, is a legend in Arizona neo-Nazi circles, venerated by racist skinheads for his work as an organizer for George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party in the 1960s.

...

Despite its infamy, U.S.A. has drawn visits from such local, far-right luminaries as State Senator Pearce, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen. But it's Sheriff Arpaio who arguably has the tightest ties to the organization.

Much of this was already known about Arpaio. But what we didn't know is that his office was coordinating things with a liaison with the USA faction:

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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.

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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:

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Keith Olbermann, on Countdown last night, brought the whammy down on the wingnut talking heads at Fox (and the rest of the conservative media as well) for their ongoing attempts to blame immigrants for the spread of the swine flu from Mexico:

Well, yes, you are a racist. Exactly how does that apply, though, to the people who the Centers for Disease Control confirmed actually carried the Swine Flu from Mexico to the U.S., a group of Catholic school students from New York City, who spent Spring Break in Cancun. Uncontrolled Catholic immigration, open borders for private school kids reckless?

Anyway, unswayed by the facts, the Republican echo chamber tried to stir the American melting pot with a classic recipe of hate and fear.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought that this line, though, was very ironic, this morning in one of the articles I read about surveillance at the Mexican border. You thought we had an immigration problem, well now we might actually want to prevent the sick people from crossing over the border.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chaos in Mexico; from earthquakes to Swine Flu, will it mean more illegals heading for the U.S.

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Does anybody wish maybe we could control the border just a little bit at this point.

SHEPPARD SMITH, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Everybody is e-mailing, going the illegals are bringing it across the border. Relax.

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Tonight, Swine Flu spreads from Mexico to the United States. Is this the latest border crisis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. is not currently testing travelers from Mexico. But customs officials are wearing protective clothing.

MICHAEL SAVAGE, “THE SAVAGE NATION”: Illegal aliens are carriers of the new strain of Human Swine Avian Flu from Mexico. Is this a terrorist attack?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some, though, say the solution is to close the border.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now talk that we should even close the border?

BECK: If this is so important, why haven‘t we closed the border.

NEAL BOORTZ, “THE NEAL BOORTZ SHOW”: There‘s the bio-terrorism angle. What better way to sneak a virus in this country than to give it to Mexicans.

This kind of talk -- directly associating the targets of a "drive them out" campaign with disease -- is classic eliminationist rhetoric. It's not surprising that it's bubbling up out of Fox News' fetid cauldron, either.

Tom Allison at Media Matters put together a first-round look at some of the ugliness:

-- Savage declaring that Mexicans "are a perfect mule -- perfect mules for bringing this virus into America."

-- Michelle Malkin warning that the pandemic was the product of "uncontrolled immigration."

-- Beck warning that the pandemic will create a crush of people trying to flee north across our border.

And that's just scratching the surface. As Eric Ward at Imagine 2050 observes, some of the nativist right's more inflammatory figures were saying even uglier things.

Writes Nezua at The Sanctuary:

The stances of those who most vocally oppose immigration today are so predictable that one could paint a face on a septic-tainted soccer ball and paste up word balloons and rest well, knowing that The Nativist Lobby point of view on any immigration-related topic will end in "deport them all" and "seal the borders" if not "round them up" and other tired ideas. And nobody reading now needs a reminder of how throughout time, both Latin America as well as all immigrants have been slurred and painted with the brush of disease by those resistant to changing demographics.

The NCLR's blog points out that this fearmongering has real life-and-death consequences:

It's unfortunate, then, that certain individuals with an obvious axe to grind are shamelessly exploiting a public health emergency for their own purposes. It's not surprising that some are implying that all immigrants are a threat to our health-that's standard fare on the hate group circuit.

Ironically, the very act of attempting to demonize and stigmatize entire groups, and even entire countries, is likely to impede these and other critical steps that the authorities are taking to protect all Americans from the spread of the flu, for example:

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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 ...