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On Friday's O'Reilly Factor, BillO dragged on Edward Schumacher-Matos, who'd had the audacity to recently pen the following words in an op-ed piece:

The fury of Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs and other nativists in response to the news that the prime suspect wanted for the murder of Chandra Levy is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador could easily be dismissed as racism.

O'Reilly indeed tried to blame the Levy murder on illegal immigration (perhaps as a way to deflect attention from the fact that BillO's longtime favorite suspect, Gary Condit, was now clearly innocent).

Having the nativist quality of this kind of "reportage" quite accurately pointed out nonetheless infuriated O'Reilly, who began arguing with Schumacher-Matos that all he's ever argued for is a system in which illegal immigrants busted for crimes in the USA be deported.

But as Schumacher-Matos pointed out in his Miami Herald column this week, O'Reilly's agitation has gone well beyond such limited measures. Indeed, it's a major component of how he slags the "liberal media":

In the Levy case, television-editorialist Bill O'Reilly and other immigration restrictionists were harshly critical of the AP story, accusing it and The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and network news shows of ''blatant press dishonesty'' for omitting that status from their stories. He accused them of pursuing an agenda to give amnesty to the country's 12 million illegal immigrants, who, he added, are responsible for ``millions of serious crimes over the past 10 years.''

Indeed, O'Reilly has gone after the New York Times in particular on these grounds.

Of course, if O'Reilly really only wanted to reform deportation procedures for undocumented immigrants busted for committing crimes, no one would be calling him a racist. But we all know the reason he keeps bringing up illegal immigrants and crime: It's an easy way of demonizing the people O'Reilly has at other times declared are going to swamp "white culture."

Media Matters has the goods on this:

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Glenn Beck, on his Fox News show yesterday, hosted Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose misbegotten approach to law enforcement last week inspired the House Judiciary Committee to join the ranks of those calling for a Justice Department investigation.

After Arpaio -- in typical Crazy Bigoted Joe style -- loudly proclaimed that the Latin American-style kidnappings now taking place in Phoenix are a product of illegal immigration (in reality, they seem to revolve around drug dealing and human trafficking), he got a nice rubdown from Beck:

Beck: But Joe, you're now facing heat in Washington. Here you are, a guy who has cleaned that town up more than anybody could -- I mean, if you go away, it ain't gonna be good. But you're facing heat now from members of Congress who are trying to shut you down.

Arpaio: Well, I'm gonna give you a scoop. I'm writing a letter to those members -- these four liberal Democrats on the Judiciary Committee -- didn't have the courtesy to call me. I think I know what goes on at the border -- fourteen years I've spent there with the feds. So I'm gonna write them a letter. I'm going to invite them down to visit the fence and visit our operations.

This is all part of the local politicians going to bed with these congressmen, going to the new attorney general. The mayor of Phoenix has already gone to the attorney general last year to try to get me investigated.

But let them all come down. Call the FBI, call everybody, if you think I'm doing something wrong. So I welcome all these investigations.

Sure. And Dick Nixon welcomed the Watergate investigations, too.

There might be a reason, after all, that local politicians -- and not merely the mayor of Phoenix -- want Arpaio investigated. The state's civil-rights commission is only the most recent entity to join the bandwagon demanding his racial profiling and outright refusal to follow civil-rights laws be brought to a halt.

And just how much has Arpaio "cleaned up" Maricopa County? Well, thanks to his blinkered, racially driven emphasis on illegal immigration in everything he does, even the Goldwater Institute found that actual law enforcement work in his county was being badly neglected:

Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.

In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure.

If that's Glenn Beck's idea of "cleaning up" a town, I'd hate to live in his town.

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I mentioned already that BillO the Clown was in prime form on The O'Reilly Factor last night. Once again much of the bulk of his ranting was reserved for his newly declared jihad against the New York Times.

O'Reilly: How the far left plans to change America by using illegal immigrants. That is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo and this is a Paul Revere Alert.

The New York Times actually did me a favor by implying I'm a racist and a white-supremacist guy. The far-left paper attacked me because I understand their agenda, and it has nothing to do with helping poor people. It has everything to do with amassing power and changing the political structure in America by using, using immigrants.

As we reported last night, the Times wants blanket amnesty for illegal aliens already in this country, and the paper wants their extended families to join them in the USA as well. That would swell the voting rolls by tens of millions, the vast majority joining the Democratic Party, because that's where the entitlements are.

... This whole caring-for-the-downtrodden deal is a ruse, a scam, a con. What the New York Times wants for the country is what has happened in California. Forty years ago the Golden State was fertile ground for Republicans and conservatives. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson -- all prospered out there. In fact, in 1968, Nixon beat Humphrey 48 to 45 in California. Last November, Obama beat McCain 61 to 37, a huge landslide. In 1970, nine percent of California's population was foreign-born. Now it is an astounding 28 percent -- and most of the new voters are Democrats. So the Dems control power in California. It is a virtual one-party state, its 55 electoral votes a lock for the Democrats.

New York is almost a one-party state -- that's 31 more electoral votes. Illinois -- completely controlled by Democrats. Another 21 electoral votes. Get the picture?

If blanket amnesty is passed, the Democratic ranks in places like Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Florida will explode, putting our two-party system in jeopardy. And that is exactly, ladies and gentlemen, what the New York Times envisions.

And guess who's also a big blanket-amnesty guy? Hey there George Soros! The far-left billionaire has donated big money to open-borders groups. And then there's the ACLU -- actively working against many laws that constrain illegal immigration, and opposing strict border enforcement.

So let's add all this up: The Times, Soros, the ACLU -- quite a lineup. If these people succeed in getting blanket amnesty passed for illegals and their families living abroad, the political system in America will change forever.

That's why the Times has branded me a racist, because I have unmasked them. They can't deny it, so they trot out the smear machine. A very troubling situation.

Got that? O'Reilly just asserts -- without even a scintilla of supporting evidence (not to mention a panoply of simply false "facts," such as his assertion that the Times "favors blanket amnesty") -- that the Times is actively seeking to remake America into a one-party Democratic state. (Funny thing -- O'Reilly never seemed to get too worked up when Grover Norquist talked about doing precisely the same thing for conservatism earlier this decade.)

The segment following featured a discussion with everyone's favorite Latino Republican columnist, Ruben Navarette, who is obviously hesitant to agree with O'Reilly's conspiracy theory. O'Reilly proceeds to badger and cajole Navarette until he more or less at least sounds like he agrees.

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Bill O'Reilly is outraged, outraged we tell you, over Sunday's superb New York Times editorial calling out Republicans -- and particularly movement conservatives who have thoroughly embraced the nativist wing of the party -- for the ugly racism they've indulged in recent years, driving what should be a rational debate over immigration into the fetid wastelands of hysterical fearmongering, bigotry, and scapegoating.

So last night on "The O'Reilly Factor" he declared "war" on the Times:

O'Reilly: In the Impact Segment tonight, more lies from the New York Times over illegal immigration. As you may know, the Times and other far-left entities favor amnesty for illegal aliens, primarily as a way to gain political power. As you may also know, most Americans reject blanket amnesty, as was demonstrated when the immigration bill of 2007 crashed and burned in Congress.

So yesterday, this man, editorial page director Andrew Rosenthal, printed a vicious piece of propaganda called "The Nativists Are Restless." In this smear, the Times implies that I and others racists because we oppose amnesty. The editorial says:

It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.

It is all around us. ... Google the words “Bill O’Reilly” and “white, Christian male power structure” for another YouTube taste of the Fox News host assailing the immigration views of “the far left” (including The Times) as racially traitorous.

Of course, you can post anything on YouTube, any lie you want, any distortion, and Google can highlight the smear in the blink of an eye -- there are no rules. For example, I could post that Andrew Rosenthal completely distorted Bill O'Reilly's view on illegal immigration, because Rosenthal is a dishonest far-left zealot who uses hateful tactics, like implying people with whom he disagrees are racist. I could post that, and then you could Google "Rosenthal" and "illegal immigration" and it would be there -- uncensored. Now if Rosenthal doesn't know that, he's stupid. If he does know it, then he's dishonest and intentionally misleading Times readers.

Well, besides O'Reilly's point being the most meaningless of nonsequiturs, it's also worth remembering exactly what does come up when you Google those terms: actual video from this site showing Bill O'Reilly, in full context, saying the following:

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we've got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don't need so many.

O'Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don't know, I don't know. We've got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.

Mind you, this was not an aberration for O'Reilly:

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I'm spending my Christmas vacation in lovely Maricopa County, AZ, this week with my in-laws. And I have to tell you that, thanks to Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his gang of thugs deputies, I'll be somewhat relieved when I leave.

After all, how would you like to live in a place where law enforcement actually arrests you for applauding briefly at a public county council meeting? Where they threaten and intimidate you just for showing up in the first place?

That's what's been happening here.

It all has to do with an anti-Arpaio group called Maricopa Citizens for Safety Accountability, which formed last spring in response to investigative reports and studies demonstrating that Arpaio's insane obsession with illegal immigrants was destroying his office's ability to actually deal with real law enforcement work.

MCSA's members have been turning up at meetings of the county Board of Supervisors and trying to speak, but the board refuses to let MCSA do so except for brief comment periods at the end of its meetings. Moreover, the board meetings are now patrolled by a huge contingent of deputies who treat the citizens who attend like criminals.

Last week, they went even further:

The Board of Supervisors' meetings also have undergone a number of changes since the Maricopa Citizens group began attending.

The supervisors cut the amount of time each member of the public is allowed to speak during the public comment portions of the public meetings. The board permits each speaker two minutes. Previously, the board gave every speaker three minutes.

Generally, eight or nine sheriff's office deputies and county security officers station themselves around the perimeter of the small auditorium where the board holds its meetings. Also, as many as 20 deputies and officers are stationed out-of-view in hallways around the edges of the auditorium and another 20 or so patrol a plaza outside the auditorium's front doors.

In the pre-Maricopa Citizens era, usually a few deputies worked the metal detectors in the auditorium's lobby and a few others remained inside the auditorium.

Most noticeably, deputies and security officers restrict movement within the auditorium, directing spectators to take seats and remain in their seats while the meetings are in session.

Previously, Board of Supervisors meetings were conducted like virtually every other public meeting, at which spectators routinely stand in the aisles and occasionally walk about to confer with other spectators.

In that regard, crowds at most public meetings more closely resemble spectators at a baseball game rather than audience members at a movie theater.

And, of course, deputies and security agents at the Board of Supervisors meetings have begun to arrest spectators. That development came Wednesday.

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Sheriff Joe Arpaio has a new reality show on Fox scheduled to debut: "Smile! You're Under Arrest". The grand concept is "'Cops' meets 'Punk'd'." Here are some details:

From creator Scott Satin (Who Wants to Marry My Dad?, Who Wants to be a Superhero?), the show features law officers in Phoenix setting up grandiose sting operations to lure criminals with warrants into their waiting hands, and cameras.

“It is a reverse Punk’d,” says Fox President of Alternative Entertainment Mike Darnell. “Instead of the worst day of your life and then a joke at the end, this is the reverse. This is the best day of your life, and then we arrest you.”

One of three set-ups just shot in Arizona features the cops luring a criminal to a movie set with the promise of making him an extra and paying him a couple hundred dollars. An elaborate film set is staged and filming begins on a faux movie. The set-up continues as the director then gets mad at the lead actor, fires him and replaces him with the law-breaking extra.

The scene escalates with the fake director introducing the mark to a supposed studio mogul and continuing to create this dream-comes-true sequence. Finally, all the participants are revealed as officers of the law, and the criminal is apprehended (before signing waivers to let the footage be used in the show).

Yes, the Sheriff Joe featured in this show is the same Maricopa County sheriff who's made a career out of arresting just about every Latino in sight, while driving law enforcement in the county right into the ground, with hundreds of crimes going uninvestigated -- all while nakedly violating federal regulations.

Moreover, he's also incurred the wrath of the ACLU by attempting to terminate a federal consent decree mandating that he maintain conditions at the county jail that meet constitutional minimums; he also was taken to court in an attempt to force him to live up to a court order to transport female prisoners to abortion appointments.

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The recent attention paid to a notorious Long Island hate crime in which a group of young whites went in search of Latinos to harm has raised serious questions about the relationship between immigrant-bashing rhetoric and the surge of anti-Latino bias crimes nationally.

And the mainstream purveyors of this rhetoric -- particularly pundits like Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs -- are denying their culpability in the only means available to them: By distorting the reality of hate crimes themselves.

In O'Reilly's case, this entailed conflating hate crimes with ordinary (and completely unrelated) crimes.

And in Dobbs', as we saw on his Monday program, it entails distorting statistics and pretending that he's never bashed or demonized Latinos on his CNN show:

DOBBS: Advocates of open borders and amnesty accusing border security advocates of fostering a wave of hate, but as usual, those groups led by La Raza and MALDEF were long on rhetoric and absolutely, absolutely devoid of facts or respect for them. Bill Tucker has our report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Being tough on illegal immigration is a bad thing in the eyes of La Raza, a Hispanic special interest group which says it represents the civil rights of all Latino immigrants. The group blames the murder of Marcello Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant on Long Island, New York, on a wave of immigrant hate sparked by local politicians who have called for enforcement of immigration law.

JANET MURGUIA, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA: Steve Levy has taken a notably hard line against immigrants in his county and has been lauded by cable hosts like Lou Dobbs as a folk hero.

TUCKER: The community has shown no tolerance for the crime. Seven teenagers were quickly arrested and charged with hate crimes ranging from assault to manslaughter in connection with that murder, the leader of the gang being held without bail. Lucero's murder though is being used by special interest groups like La Raza and MALDEF to call attention to what they call "a wave of hate crime in America."

However, just last month the FBI reported a slight decline in hate crimes nationally last year. The FBI saying there were just over 7,600 hate crimes versus just over 7,700 the year before. Groups calling for the enforcement of immigration law are furious that La Raza and MALDEF and others equate their position with hate.

DAN STEIN, F.A.I.R.: Their true agenda is to try to stop public discussion about the need to control the borders. And they are using isolated incidents, tragic incidents, to be sure, but isolated ones, and distorting statistics to try to muzzle important free-speech rights in this country.

TUCKER: Not once in the news conference was the phrase "illegal immigration" used or heard, instead the phrase "immigrant bashing" and "anti-immigrant" were the word choices of the day.

Dobbs and Tucker essentially lie by omission here: Even though hate crimes have in fact declined overall in the past couple of years, anti-Latino bias crimes have actually increased significantly. In other words, the statistics actually speak strongly to the fact that Latino-bashing bias crimes are on the rise because those figures run counter to the larger trend of declines in such crimes generally.

[Heidi Beirich at SPLC's Hatewatch has more on this point.]

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Earlier this week on The O'Reilly Factor, the Papa Bear did what right-wingers constantly do when discussing hate crimes: he conflated them with ordinary crimes in a way that deliberately confuses the public regarding the nature of these crimes.

As you can see in this clip (or from the transcript), O'Reilly starts out by discussing the horrendous hate crime on Long Island wherein a group of six young white thugs went out looking for Latinos to harm for "sport", and they wound up killing an Ecuadoran immigrant named Marcelo Lucero.

But then he seems to connect this crime to a completely unrelated tragedy involving the deaths of two women at the hands of a drunken driver who happened to be an illegal immigrant.

How are they connected? O'Reilly explains:

So, three human beings are dead because of irresponsible conduct and failed government.

The New York Times and Newsday have covered the Lucero murder extensively, as they should. It is a horrible crime, and seven young men may pay a steep price for being violently stupid.

But the Times and Newsday have pretty much ignored the deaths of the two women. This is a pattern in America.

People killed by illegal aliens can expect little coverage from a media that wants amnesty for foreign nationals here illegally.

But in the end, it is the federal government that is truly responsible for the deaths, and for the entire illegal alien problem. ...

It would be nice to think that O'Reilly simply doesn't comprehend the difference between a hate crime and an ordinary crime. I've explained this many times:

Hate crimes are message crimes: They are intended to harm not just the immediate victim, but all people of that same class within the community. Their message is also irrevocable: they are "get out of town, nigger/Jew/queer" crimes.

That's why bias-crime laws are about imposing stiffer sentences on their perpetrators: they cause more real harm to the community. This principle -- greater harm brings stiffer punishment -- is a basic element of criminal law.

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One aspect of the 2008 election outcome that will likely have real long-term consequences for the nation's political alignment is the emergence of the power of the Latino vote.

It's looking increasingly as though Latinos have moved semi-permanently into the Democrats' column, in large part because the Republican brand has been semi-permanently tainted with the ugly nativist bigotry that has immersed movement conservatism. It certainly played a significant role in the voters' repudiation of all things conservative.

Andres Ramirez at NDN Blog likewise pored over the numbers and found, among other things:

Hispanics Improved The Margin of Victory in These Four States - In Colorado, Obama’s Hispanic support accounted for 7.9% of the electorate, while Obama won by 9%. In Florida, Obama’s Hispanic support accounted for 7.9% of the electorate, while Obama won by 3%. In Nevada, Obama’s Hispanic support accounted for 11.4% of the electorate, while Obama won by 12%. In New Mexico, Obama’s Hispanic support accounted for 28.3% of the electorate, while Obama won by 15%.

If These Trends Continue, the National Map Will Continue to Get Harder for Republicans – Of the nine states that flipped from Bush 2004 to Obama 2008, four were heavily Latino states. Just as Pete Wilson’s taking on Hispanics in the 1990s contributed to the transformation of California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, from a swing to the bluest of blue states, the demonization of Hispanics by the national GOP is turning very critical battleground states much more blue.

A recent study by America's Voice looks at how 19 out of 21 pro-reform candidates beat nativist hard-liners in key battleground contests around the country:

Here's the essence: swing voters chose candidates that stood up for a more comprehensive approach to immigration reform than their hard-line opponents. Latino voters turned out in record numbers and voted down the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican Party. Their participation in the 2008 elections contributed to Senator Obama's wins in key battleground states like Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Florida, and also helped Democrats win contested House and Senate races in these states and beyond.

Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant forces that have all but hijacked the Republican Party proved to be inconsequential at best, except for their role in potentially driving the GOP into the political wilderness with Latino and New American voters.

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Zvika Krieger at TNR has a solid report on the demise and dissolution of the Minuteman movement:

In this environment, Gilchrist's movement is falling apart, overtaken by new members whom he describes as "troublemakers with personality disorders and criminal propensities." In contrast, he insists that the group's original members were able to give voice to the immigration concerns of ordinary Americans because they demonstrated "a passionate allegiance to the United States of America and its priceless principles." There is no doubt that the Minutemen--aided by sympathizers in the media like Lou Dobbs--drove the national conversation in 2005. But whether the enormous wellspring of American anger over illegal immigration that they claim to have tapped into actually existed is another question.

However, it's not merely Gilchrist's organization (The Minuteman Project) that's falling apart; so is the other major "Minuteman" outfit, cofounder Chris Simcox's Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

For what it's worth, I reported on this aspect of the story, as well as Gilchrist's, back in October for The American Prospect:

Today the Minuteman movement is beyond mere disarray; it is in the early stages of complete decay. The arc of the Minutemen's decline and fall happens to trace almost precisely that of previous right-wing populist movements, notably the Klan of the 1920s and the militias of the 1990s. The pattern goes like this: The group is beset by financial manipulators who seem naturally drawn to them. Then, following an initial wave of popularity, the group splinters under the pressure of competing egos into smaller, more virulent entities who then unleash acts of public ugliness and violence that eventually relegate them to the fringes.

The Minutemen haven't quite reached that final stage yet, but they are well on their way. And while that may be welcome news to those who oppose the Minutemen's nativist agenda, that last stage represents some natural and equally toxic consequences.