John McCain’s incoherence on immigration policy has quickly gone from problematic to humiliating. The poor guy has spun himself into a box he can’t seem to get out of.

Just Thursday, in a relatively high-profile speech in California, McCain went back to the position he’d given up to win the Republican nomination. McCain boasted about having worked with Ted Kennedy and said, “[W]e must enact comprehensive immigration reform. We must make it a top agenda item.” McCain went on to take an anti-deportation position on immigrants already in the U.S. who entered the country illegally, saying “they are also God’s children, and we have to do it in a human and compassionate fashion.”

Soon after, far-right activists were apoplectic, especially given McCain’s repeated assurances during the primaries that he’d given on a “comprehensive” approach to immigration reform. So, the day after his speech, McCain reversed course yet again.

McCain’s campaign, however, quickly pandered to the right wing. The National Review’s Jim Geraghty reports that the campaign said McCain’s statement on the priority of immigration reform was “poorly worded“:

“Team McCain tells me the senator’s comments were poorly worded. There’s been no discussion within the campaign of altering their stance on illegal immigration, and as far as everyone on the campaign is concerned, the policy is still, ’secure the border first.’”

This doesn’t make a lick of sense. On Thursday, McCain was talking to a group of business leaders who liked McCain’s original approach to comprehensive legislation, and the senator sought input on how best to rally support for his own bill (which he now says he’d vote against). On Friday, McCain told opponents of his immigration bill that he didn’t mean any of what he’d just said.

This is more than just a shameless flip-flop; it’s quickly becoming a character flaw. He’ll shovel whichever nonsense he has to say to please which ever audience happens to be in front of him at the time.

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When John McCain’s presidential campaign faltered badly last summer, there were a variety of problems, but near the top of the list was McCain’s work on a comprehensive immigration reform measure, which most Republican activists hated with a vengeance. McCain ultimately decided to abandon his own legislation, and announced earlier this year that he wouldn’t even vote for his own bill.

Now that he’s locked down the Republican nomination, McCain has decided to reverse course again, re-embracing the position he abandoned in order to gain GOP support.

In yet another sign of his pivoting toward the general election, Senator John McCain said at a roundtable with business leaders here today that comprehensive immigration reform should be a top priority for the next president. […]

Mr. McCain largely stopped talking about the issue and repeatedly invoked a mantra that he had gotten the message from voters that the borders needed to be secured first, before any solution for the illegal immigrants already here is addressed.

Sure, but that was when he was pandering to far-right activists, who he needed to get the GOP nomination. Now that he’s vanquished his Republican rivals, McCain feels comfortable pulling the hard-to-execute flip-flop-flip, gambling that conservatives will hate Obama enough to give McCain a pass.

Indeed, yesterday, speaking at a business roundtable in Silicon Valley alongside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, McCain boasted of working with Ted Kennedy and said, “[W]e must enact comprehensive immigration reform. We must make it a top agenda item.” McCain went on to take an anti-deportation position on immigrants already in the U.S. who entered the country illegally, saying “they are also God’s children, and we have to do it in a human and compassionate fashion.”

McCain does so many reversals on this issue, I’m surprised he’s not dizzy. The far-right, meanwhile, is not amused.

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Paul Waldman at The Sanctuary (crossposted at DailyKos)

If your only source of news is cable during prime time, you might be among those who believe that the U.S. government and American society are groaning under the weight of undocumented immigrants. You might believe that there is a terrifying crime wave attributable to illegal immigration. You might believe that undocumented immigrants feast on a cornucopia of social services, while avoiding paying taxes. You might also believe that they are voting illegally in large numbers, and that they bring with them all sorts of diseases. You might also believe that there are secret plans afoot to give away American sovereignty, as the United States joins with Canada and Mexico in a North American Union similar to the European Union. You might even believe that there is an enormous "NAFTA Superhighway," running all the way from Mexico City to Toronto, in the works as we speak.

All of these ideas are false, but you might believe them if you watch prime-time cable news. We at the Media Matters Action Network have documented the spread of this kind of misinformation in our latest report, Fear & Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News, which focuses on the three cable hosts most responsible for spreading misinformation and fostering fear and anger about undocumented immigrants: Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck. Read on...

I would understand this behavior if he at least was wearing a F*&k Bush t-shirt:

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit - meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon - eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

And then:

Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, “You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country.”...read on

That was probably music to Tom Tancredo's ears. I doubt Geno would serve him a Philly cheesesteak either, but shackels?

I like Digby's take:

One of the most frustrating things about the authoritarian house that Bush built is the argument that you have to trust them, they're only doing it to "keep the country safe." But when you put a large bunch of bozos in boots and uniforms and give them the authority to be assholes --- some of them will inevitably be assholes. If you've read anything about the totalitarian states of the 20th century, you know what can happen.

OK, we keep entering the land of the bizarre.

A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.

What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: "I have determined that you pose a security threat."

Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.

And the agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration matters, including student visas.

Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said the security agency should remove the misleading language from all files and issue new letters formally withdrawing the "threat" label.

But Ms. Howe, the agency spokeswoman, said that the letters were legal, if flawed, and that there were no plans to send replacements.

Q: Yes, my name is Wilken and I would like an ID please?

A: Dude, you have a weird name and are from a foreign land therefore you are deemed a security threat and maybe sent to Gitmo immediately.

What the heck is going on?

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We've come a long way from "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and not in a good way. On 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley looked at the horrific conditions faced by immigrants to this country--both legal and illegal--in detention centers including almost criminal medical negligence.

In 2004, United Nations troops were fighting militant gangs in the streets of Haiti. Eighty-one-year-old Reverend Joseph Dantica, a Baptist minister, saw his church ransacked during the unrest, so he fled to the United States and asked for political asylum. His niece, Edwidge Danticat (her last name is spelled differently than her uncle's) says he was taken straight to a U.S. immigration detention center.

"He was essentially arrested?" Pelley asks.

"Yes. I consider it an arrest," Danticat says. "Because ...he had to ask for special relief for him not to be handcuffed. And they did allow him that, but told him that if he ran, they would shoot him."[..]

Records show that two days later, during an asylum hearing, he became violently ill and collapsed. A detention center physician's assistant failed to recognize that Dantica was in serious trouble.

"Help me understand from the records that you've seen precisely what the medic said about your uncle and his condition," Pelley asks.

"It appears that he said, 'I think he's faking,' or something to that effect," Danticat says.

It took four hours to get Rev. Dantica to an outside hospital. His family wasn't allowed to see him. In a day and a half, Rev. Dantica was dead. The medical examiner said it was pancreatitis.[..]

"Yeah. And after being treated like an animal," Danticat says. "Someone who was just trying to escape horrible things, who was so old and sick. Just had to die that way."

But in one sense, Rev. Dantica was not alone: he's among hundreds of sick or dying detainees inside 22 detention centers, plus some 350 state and local jails. The federal lock-ups range from a former warehouse in New Jersey that houses 325 people, to a desert facility near the Mexican border.

The centers are run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known by its initials "ICE."

Inside the detention centers, medical care is provided by another federal agency, the Division of Immigration Health Services, or DIHS. Reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post have been investigating DIHS.

Xenophobic bigot Tom Tancredo has come under fire for suggesting at a hearing yesterday in Brownsville, TX, that the proposed border fence ought to be built on the northern side of the town. Since the beginning of the immigration/border debate, Brownsville has become the "epicenter" of opposition to the fence.

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Valley Morning Star:

Boos and hisses emanated from the audience for a congressional field hearing when Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado dismissed residents' concerns that the effort to build 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border by year's end would damage the environment and destroy a centuries-old bond between residents on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Late in the five-hour hearing, Tancredo returned to a comment made earlier by panelist Betty Perez, a rancher and local activist. Perez said, ``It really isn't a border to most of us who live down here.''

Tancredo dismissed Perez's remarks as a ``multiculturalist attitude toward borders.''

As jeers rose, Tancredo added, ``I suggest that you build this fence around the northern part of your city.''

So what side of the border does Tancredo want to see Brownsville sitting? It's nice to see Tancredo get the reaction he deserves. Perhaps the "I hate everything foreign" card won him some points in the GOP primary, but it does nothing but alienate most sensible and thoughtful Americans.

It's amazing how tough it is for some of these racist, bigoted Republicans to restrain themselves from revealing their true colors in what are supposed to be civilized settings. Colorado State Rep. Douglas Bruce was immediately scolded and barred from speaking Monday after he called migrant workers "illiterate peasants" on the floor of the statehouse. Kudos to the fellow lawmakers who were quick and swift with their denunciations.

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Denver Post:

Disparaging remarks aimed at migrant workers got resident House rabble-rouser Douglas Bruce banned from speaking on a temporary-worker bill today.

"We don't need 5,000 more illiterate peasants in the state of Colorado," Bruce, R-Colorado Springs, told the chamber to an audible gasp.

Rep. Kathleen Curry, leading the House at the time, immediately barred Bruce from speaking at the podium, an uncommon maneuver.

"How dare you?" she asked Bruce, before House members moved back to discussion of a bill aimed at helping seasonal farm workers from other countries enter the state legally on a temporary basis.

Scholars&Rogues:

In case you’re unfamiliar with Bruce, he masterminded Colorado’s notorious Amendment 2 debacle and the state’s disastrous “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” (TABOR). He’s been relatively calm of late, having only been involved in three embarrassments this calendar year (until today).

• In January he became the first representative ever formally censured by the Colorado legislature. Why? For kicking a photographer.
• He pissed off his colleagues by refusing to support a bill honoring military personnel, a move that got him removed from a House committee overseeing veterans affairs.
• In February he got caught - ironically enough, given TABOR - charging the state for days he didn’t actually work.

UPDATE: Rep. Bruce responds by digging deeper.

It was the hat all along! I posted about Sebastian Horsley, a British author who was detained at Newark airport and then not allowed into America all because---he wrote a book that Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for the New York office of United States Customs and Border Protection said didn't meet the moral standards of the USA and he was therefore not admissible to our country. Now we find out a little more of the story:

To Mr. Horsley, who has in the past entered the country without incident, the recent fracas arose less from his past indulgences than a current one. In short, his very tall top hat. “It’s a stovepipe,” he said, referring to the subspecies made famous seven score and seven years ago by Abraham Lincoln. “They asked my girlfriend, ‘Why is he wearing that hat?’ And she told them, ‘Because it wouldn’t fit in his suitcase.’

One of the first questions they asked me was, ‘What have you got inside that hat?’ I said, ’My head.’ ”

This is just insane. I wonder if Lucille Cirillo was a graduate of Regent University just like the former top DoJ aide Monica Goodling?

As Arthur says:

This is a laughably, lamentably pathetic state of affairs for the United States, that paragon of freedom and of The Individual. Yes, we love the individual -- just so long as he is an individual like most others.

Nonetheless, on we go. Careful what you dare to think, and careful what you wear. You wouldn't want to be too threatening to the complacency that envelops most people, a complacency of such depth and pervasiveness that it becomes indistinguishable from death...read on

'This is a country, not a country club.'

This is really disturbing.

Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour.

Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for the New York office of United States Customs and Border Protection, said she could not comment on specific cases. But in an e-mail message, she said that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, "travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible."...read on

I was going to opine on this at length, but I'll let Arthur Silber elaborate:

I appreciate Horsley's irony in the face of injustice. It should go without saying that in light of the metastasizing American surveillance state and the numerous ways in which individual liberty is destroyed daily in this country, to say nothing of the Horsley story itself, "land of the free" is now the dream that has gone.

Finally, consider the following. Sebastian Horsley is a private citizen, who happens to have written a book. He was detained for eight hours, questioned extensively about personal behavior that is not criminal by any reasonable and valid standard, and then sent packing back to London. Your kind is not wanted here, he was told. And the United States government used its considerable power to enforce its judgment...read on