Immigration and eliminationism

Those mass marches are having their effect: They're scaring the crap out of the nativists.

And they're fighting back in the usual, expected fashion ... by lying and making ugly but empty threats.

At least, we hope they're empty. Because what they're advocating, increasingly, is eliminating all 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. How they'll achieve that is something, however, they leave to our imaginations.

Recently a powerful Arizona legislator named Russell Pearce, a Republican from Mesa, recently uttered the following in response to the marches:

They're illegal and they have no right to be marching down our streets. They have no constitutional rights. They don't have First-, Fourth-, Sixth amendment rights. They're here illegally and they chose to be here illegally.

Pearce heads the state's House appropriations panel, has served as a judge, and was for many years a law-enforcement officer. And he really believes this?

As Blogs for Arizona explains, illegal aliens in fact have all kinds of rights under the constitution, including due-process rights, free-speech rights, search-and-seizure rights, and criminal-justice rights.

Of course, we hear the word "illegal" all the time in the nativists' arguments. "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?" is one of the Minutemen's favorite T-shirt slogans.

To which the appropriate response is: "What part of 'bad law' don't you understand?"

The bottom line in the immigration debate is that current immigration law -- as well as the proposals being floated by the Tancredo wing of the Republican Party (including James Sensenbrenner) -- is inadequate for dealing with the realities forced on us by economic forces which no amount of border fence and no mass expulsions will overcome. As I explained before, there are two forces driving the current wave of emigration: 1) a massive wage and standard-of-living gap between the United States and its immediate and most populous neighbor, and 2) the increasing demand for cheap labor in the United States.

Stressing that these immigrants' status as "illegal" begs the whole question of whether the laws on the books are adequate or just. They just create a whole class of criminals out of people who come here to work, and the latter has always been the driving force in immigration throughout our history.

But the nativists don't care. They like simple solutions. It's easier to blame the poverty-stricken pawns in this economic game, and take their anger out on them, than to deal with the core problems. What they're interested in is a scapegoat. After all, that's what they do.

Constantly shouting "illegals!" furthers the nativists' aims by separating these people from the rest of us: they're non-citizens, and thus by extension almost non-entities. Perhaps even non-human.

That certainly seems to be the line of thinking adopted by at least one right-wing blogger (wouldn't you know it, another of those "reformed liberals" who now claims that he and his "Red State" kind represent the real America). In a post decrying those "illegal aliens," he compared them to rats:

We can learn from Buffalo, New York. Now in Buffalo the rat problem in the city was a huge one. Exterminators could not handle the problem. But then in 2001 the city mandated that everyone would have to begin using special anti-rat garbage totes that the rats could not open. With no way to get to the garbage, the rats left Buffalo. Now, they went to the suburbs and now the suburbs are fighting them. But it is no longer a problem for the people of Buffalo, New York. Here is how to do the same with our problem:

1) No services.

Absolutely no services of any kind for those who cannot prove they are in the country legally. Nothing but emergency medical care. Without all the social services, medical and other services provided for them, the illegals will find life here less attractive.

2) No schools.

Absolutely no schooling for anyone who cannot prove they belong here legally.

3) No easy birthright.

Change the law. Now, if you are born here, you are a citizen. I say, if you cannot prove that you were born here and that your mother was here legally at the time, then your citizenship is that of the mother and not of the USA.

4) No legal status. No drivers licenses. No bank accounts. No ability to sue a citizen. No legal standing for anyone who is in this country illegally.

5) No free lunch for "The Man".

Make it a criminal offense (and enforce it if it is already on the books) to hire an illegal alien, or to rent a dwelling place to him, or to sell him a home knowing that he intends to live there. Make employers provide documentation for all of their workers. You put the onus on "The Man" and it suddenly becomes less appealing to take advantage of the illegals.


THE RATS WILL GO SOMEWHERE ELSE

Anyone familiar with eliminationist rhetoric recognizes this motif: compare the object of elimination with vermin, and then describe the steps you need to take to "exterminate" them.

Indeed, the "rats" comparison has a particularly ugly history: it was, after all, one of the most effective pieces of imagery in film created by Nazi propagandists in drumming up hatred of Jews, as Richard Webster explained:

The film Der Ewige Jude, which formed part of a propaganda programme designed to justify to the German people the deportations of Jews which were already taking place, included a powerful montage sequence in which Jews were compared to rats. In the words of the commentary, 'rats ... have followed men like parasites from the very beginning … They are cunning, cowardly and fierce, and usually appear in large packs. In the animal world they represent the element of subterranean destruction.' Having noted that rats spread disease and destruction, the commentary suggested that they occupied a position 'not dissimilar to the place that Jews have among men'. At this point in the film, footage of rats squirming through sewers is followed first by the image of a rat crawling up through a drain-cover into the street and then by shots of Jewish people crowded together in ghettos.

In the Security Service report on the film, the comparison of the Jewish people to rats was held to be 'particularly impressive'.

There is, of course, nothing intrinsically anti-semitic (or racist) about the image of the rat. However, presenting images of Jews as unclean insects or rodents was perhaps the most effective way not only of arousing and confirming anti-semitic hatred but of directly inciting physical violence by stirring some of people's deepest fears and anxieties. The same idea was used in 'instant' propaganda exercises to prepare for mass murder. According to one account, peasants recruited by the Germans in occupied countries in order to help in mass murders were given an intensive training course which lasted only a few hours, and which consisted in the study of pictures representing Jews as small repulsive beasts (Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1949, p. 54)

It also has a history of use in America, particularly in immigration and race debates. Recall, for instance, that James Phelan, a U.S. Senator from California, made nearly identical attacks upon Japanese immigrants. Phelan was urging the passage of immigration restrictions and "alien land laws" that stripped immigrants of the right to own land, and whipping up fears that the West Coast would (thanks to those evil "picture brides" and their progeny) soon be overrun by "yellow people," when he explained it thus:

The rats are in the granary. They have gotten in under the door and they are breeding with alarming rapidity. We must get rid of them or lose the granary.

It's also been used in recent years to demonize gays and lesbians.

Fortunately, the blogger in question seems to be extremely obscure, with limited influence. But it's interesting to see the "vermin" motif popping up increasingly in discussions of illegal immigration, particularly paired with discussions of rounding up and deporting all illegal aliens.

After all, it's not just obscure bloggers doing this. It includes guys like Michael Savage, who claims millions of listeners.

Likewise, you're hearing a lot of talk about rounding up and deporting all illegal aliens. But you don't hear any of them telling us how they intend to achieve this --despite the fact that we're talking about 11 million people and, without question, one of the pillars of an economy increasingly built on cheap labor.

You can hear this not just from organizations like VDare -- rated a "hate group" by the SPLC but endorsed by Michelle Malkin and many others -- but also from people with real influence and power, like Newt Gingrich and James Sensenbrenner.

Kinda puts that news a few weeks ago about Halliburton building mass detention centers to cope with an "immigration emergency" in perspective, doesn't it?

Bigotry and freedom

The religious right sure has a funny idea of what constitutes freedom in America. It's pretty clear that when they talk about free speech and constitutional rights, they intend it to include only themselves and no one else.

This doesn't merely cover such matters as sexual orientation. It even appears to include the freedom of religion.

Take, for instance, their latest campaign to give themselves the right to bash gays and lesbians:

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.

What's revealing about their argument, as always, is that they insist that antidiscrimination laws should only cover such "inborn traits" as race and gender:

Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify all manner of harassment.

"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.

Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different -- a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.

By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

"Think how marginalized racists are," said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom. "If we don't address this now, it will only get worse."

We've heard this argument many times before, most often when the issue of hate crimes arises: Because being gay, we're told, is a "chosen behavior," it is undeserving of civil rights protections.

As I've noted previously:

It's the same reason given by many evangelicals -- and particularly black and minority evangelicals, and people who claim they support civil rights -- for not supporting gays and lesbians in hate-crime protections: "You can't compare being gay to being black. One's immutable, one's chosen."

Well, yes, this is true when it comes to race. And even ethnicity. These are, after all, two of the three main legs of anti-discrimination and hate-crimes laws.

But it's not true of the third leg of these laws: religion. Last I checked, this too was a "chosen behavior."

If we restrict antidiscrimination laws only to "inborn traits," then the right to choose our religious faith (or lack thereof) will immediately be at risk, too.

Of course, this doesn't much bother fundamentalists, since they already claim that they represent the only "true" Christianity, and consider anything that departs from their dogma to be "unChristian." Along similar lines, they also claim that this is a "Christian nation" that should abide by Biblical laws.

But it should bother the rest of us -- particularly those whose religious beliefs may not be in line with the fundamentalists'.

It doesn't take much imagination, after all, to see the same principle -- that free speech rights include the "right" to discriminate, harass, intimidate, and threaten -- applied to other "chosen behaviors" like religious faith.

So if you're a liberal Methodist, or Catholic, or a Jew, good "Christians" believe they should have the right to discriminate against you, too.

It all leads one to wonder: Is ignorant, unAmerican bigotry also an "inborn trait"?

Ashamed

This may put me in the minority of bloggers, but I don't much care for blogging when I travel. Especially when I'm spending my days escorting my daughter through the commercial wonders of Disneyland, which primarily constitute serial adventures in line-standing and swollen, aching feet.

But duty beckons, thanks to Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse, who wrote a lengthy response to my recent post at Firedoglake regarding the way that mainstream conservatism has increasingly come to reflect genuinely extremist values and ideas, largely through the sorts of thinly veiled appeals it makes.

It's noteworthy because, as readers know, this is a trend I've been documenting for some time, most notably in my two Koufax-winning series. And in all that time, I haven't seen anyone on the right try to tackle the argument in anything approaching a serious fashion. Most avoid my thesis like the plague, and if any do acknowledge it, it's usually given the standard substance-free airy dismissal (to wit: this is just too absurd to dignify with a response).

Alas, for all the words that Moran expends on my behalf, the end product is thin gruel indeed.

Take, for instance, Moran's claim that I "put the cart before the horse" regarding the movement of far-right appeals into the conservative mainstream; he claims, instead, that right-wing extremists have simply adopted mainstream positions and tried to spin them as their own:

The only problem with Mr. Neiwert’s notions of insidious issue creep by racists and fascists into the mainstream of conservatism is that he is blaming the responsible right for the fact that the racists adopted these issues, mixed them into an unrecognizable porridge of nauseating half truths and bowdlerized slogans, and spewed the result onto the internet and elsewhere trying to appear reasonable.

In short, while trying to connect Neo-Nazis to conservatives, Mr. Neiwert makes a classic, some would say stupid mistake; he puts the cart before the horse. It was not conservatives who adopted these issues from the extremists; it was the other way around.

This is his strongest argument, incidentally, and if his chronology were actually correct, he'd have a point. But it's not.

You see, David Duke and like-minded neo-Nazis were adopting these issues in the 1970s, well before they became part of Republican cant. And while it is true that many of them surfaced in the Reagan '80s, well before Pat Buchanan offered his formula for transmitting far-right ideas into the mainstream, the reality is that the trend has rapidly accelerated since then.

Take, for instance, the way the extremist right served as an echo chamber for mainstream conservative appeals during the Clinton years, especially in building up anti-Clinton animus with a whole raft of bizarre charges that formed the foundation for the impetus to impeach. Moreover, it's become embodied in the way that genuinely fringe figures like Randall Terry, Jim Gilchrist, and Jared Taylor have been subsequently embraced by the mainstream right as somehow representative of their ideals. It's also embodied in the way that Duke themes -- particularly his 1990s tomes describing how white America's values were in danger of being overrun by brown hordes -- keep popping up among mainstream conservatives; not surprisingly, the best example of this was Buchanan's book The Death of the West.

Moran's subsequent point borders on the downright inane:

I would suggest to Mr. Neiwert that his next article deal with the adoption by the Communist Party USA of many liberal issues such as racial justice, anti-war agitation, universal health care, and reigning in corporate power. Or better yet, he might want to take on Osama Bin Laden and that worthy’s peculiar habit of regurgitating liberal talking points about America, the war, and western civilization every time he makes a videotape.

Of course, it's Moran who himself is putting the cart before the horse himself here -- that is, extremists like the Communist Party are simply latching themselves onto legitimate mainstream issues, such as they did with civil rights in the 1950s -- if he thinks this kind of argument has any legitimacy. But it's clear he doesn't; he's just hoping to score rhetorical points, which only works if your characterization of the case is accurate. (As for Mr. Bin Laden, perhaps Moran hasn't noticed that the reality of fundamentalist Islamic radicals is that what they hate most about the West is embodied most in what are traditionally liberal quarters: free speech, sexual tolerance, a desire to break free from the chains of oppressive traditionalism.)

Perhaps more to the point, he seems not to understand that the concept of "transmission" -- that is, the movement of ideas and appeals from the extremist fringes into the mainstream through their careful repackaging -- does indeed hold as true for the left as for the right. Likewise, what he also neglects to comprehend is that the very real difference is that, for mainstream liberalism, such transmissions are nearly nonexistent now, however much they may have occurred in the past (and the historical instances are actually few and far between, and typically relegated to lesser issues, unless you're one of those nuts who believe FDR really was a communist). The nearly opposite is true of the mainstream right currently.

Moran goes on to not only demonstrate an abysmal grasp of the facts regarding right-wing behavior, he actually goes on to reproduce some of the same transmissions by way of acting as an apologist for his cohorts. To wit:

-- Michelle Malkin, he claims, has only a peripheral association with the hate group VDare, which exists only because they run her syndicated column. If Malkin's associations with the VDare clan ended there, he might have a point -- though a limited one, since columnists do have the right to deny anyone they like (or dislike) the right to run their work; if the National Alliance or Council of Conservative Citizens or Stormfront, all nakedly racist outfits, wanted to run Malkin's column, I would assume she would deny them that option (though that might be a bad assumption). Moreover, Malkin blogrolls VDare on not just her blog, but also on her subsidiary Immigration Blog. Additionally, she has on several occasions sprung to the defense of the VDare crowd, particularly Steve Sailer.

-- Glenn Reynolds, he claims, is really not a right-wing blogger at all but a libertarian one. Of course, Reynolds has made this claim for years as well, but those familiar with Reynolds' track record of uniform support for conservatives and their agendas, and converse animus towards liberals and theirs, tends to belie the claim. The decisive factor for me has been Reynolds' uniform support for the Bush administration's seemingly endless undermining of civil liberties, supposedly the heart of libertarian ideals. I have in my possession an e-mail that Reynolds sent in 1997 to a listserv I was on, attacking Clinton's post-Oklahoma City push for bolstering law-enforcement efforts for intelligence gathering on domestic terrorists and claiming that he didn't think any American should be willing to give up their privacy rights for the purpose of preventing terrorism; and yet his track record regarding the Bush administration has been precisely the opposite (uniform support for the Patriot Act -- which made the Clinton initiatives look minor in comparison -- and its sequel, as well as Bush's use of NSA for domestic surveillance).

-- He goes on to defend Reynolds' and other right-wingers smear of MEChA without really comprehending that what Reynolds did in calling MEChA "fascist hatemongers" and "racist and homophobic" was, among other things, to link MEChA to a group of Latino anti-Semites without any grounding for doing so, and then, after the mistake was pointed out to him, simply noted that the connection was in error: no apology, and no attempt to explain to his readers that his characterization was grossly off course.

-- Even worse, Moran defends Reynolds and Malkin by citing El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (a document written in 1969) and noting:

The translation of that last little ditty is "On behalf of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing."

But hey! Don't call them hatemongers!

Note that Moran calls this phrase MEChA's "motto" when, in fact, it is not; it's simply a slogan that appeared in some of its early organizing documents. Its actual motto is "La union hace la fuerza," or "Unity creates power."

Moreover, as I explained way back when, in a post that was included in the links of the Firedoglake post:

Most of the characterizations of MEChA's rhetoric have ranged from the extremely tendentious to outright gross distortions. And nearly all of them are devoid of both historical and current social context.

One of the prime examples of distortion in the debate is the way a number of the anti-Mechistas, including Malkin and Kaus, have zeroed in on the MEChA slogan: Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.

Kaus offers the translation of this slogan that in fact has been used by every one of the MEChA critics:

(Many American Jewish groups fight against assimilation too, but I haven't seen any with a slogan equivalent to "For the Race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.")

Before supposedly smart people go publishing such nonsense, it would help if they consulted, say, a native Spanish speaker (and one would think one would be available somewhere in Santa Monica).

A more accurate translation of the slogan would recognize that though "Por" translates to the English "For," it is used in a very specific sense of the word -- namely, "On behalf of" or "In the service of". "Fuera" is not "for those outside" but rather refers to the speaker, and means "Apart from." So what the slogan actually says is this:

In the service of the race, everything
Apart from the race, nothing

There is nothing remotely racist, particularly in the sense of being exclusionist or derogatory, about this, of course. The second line clearly only refers to the need to maintain one's ethnic and cultural identity. It is only racist if you deliberately mistranslate it: "For those outside the race, nothing."

Perhaps even more to the point, as I explained subsequently, "la Raza" is specifically a pan-racial concept, describing a populist notion of "the people," a notion that specifically includes a number of races, since the people of Mexico are actually constituted of a range of distinct races:

A more accurate translation would read, "In service of my people, everything; [for] apart from my people, [I have] nothing." There is neither the exclusionist nor the racist content that Malkin implies. La Raza, it must be noted, is not a racial concept but an ethnic one (it comprises multiples races, in fact).

This kind of sloppiness is typical of Moran's entire argument here. As you can see, his case simply falls apart when you examine it with any care.

In the end, though, I was most amused by Moran's remark that I "ought to be ashamed of [my]self."

And you know, it's true: I am ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed for having worked for so many years in mainstream media and, even while recognizing these trends as they developed in the 1990s, never having written about them with any detail or clarity because I thought it would be impolitic.

I'm ashamed for having assumed, for so many years, that the differences between the extremist right and the mainstream right were more significant than their similarities. That is, until it became all too apparent that the differences were growing smaller and the similarities growing much, much greater.

That's what I'm ashamed of.

But it's amusing that Moran would think I should be ashamed, yet he somehow couldn't bring himself to say the same of Ann Coulter when she called Muslims "ragheads" in a major convention speech; instead, he just called her "beyond over the top" and tut-tutted her obvious extremism. Though perhaps we should give him some credit for at least recognizing that.

However, he seems unable to bring himself to admit that Malkin and Reynolds -- let alone the Little Green Footballs or Lucianne Goldberg crowds, all of whom reside on his blogroll -- likewise have plenty to be "ashamed of." Indeed, it seems that there's little right-wing behavior he can find that anyone should be ashamed of.

Which is, really, a shame. But hardly surprising.

Those transmitters

I'm late getting this up (it's been that kind of day) but I hope all my regular readers got a chance to read my guest post at Firedoglake regarding the creep of right-wing extremism into the conservative mainstream, and the role of right-wing bloggers in making that happen.

Many thanks to Jane and the gang for giving me the opportunity to speak to their deservedly large audience.

And a special thanks to James Wolcott for the link and lengthy cite. Be sure to read his take on all this, including his always-trenchant account of the antics of one Dr. Jack Wheeler.

Crazy Curt and the Moonies

Somehow, I suspect that if Republican Rep. Curt Weldon had such a choice available, he'd be recommending that his opponents' families obtain treatment in hospitals operated by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. A flashback:

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, former felon and current owner of The Washington Times, was the man in the spotlight, declaring himself humanity’s "savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

The event, which took place March 23, was sponsored by the Washington Times Foundation and the International Interreligious Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), a Moon-led group. Present at different points during the event were Reps. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Sen. Mark Dayton (R-Minn.).

One of Moon's claims that evening was that "Hitler and Stalin have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons."

Reporter John Gorenfeld originally broke the story in Salon, and followed up a few weeks later by examining Weldon's role and his response:

Well, when it comes to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the office of U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon is speaking with a definitive -- uhh, well, not so fast.

While Weldon vows that Moon will never again dupe him, his chief of staff, Michael Conallen, won't rule out Weldon's attending future events held by Moon's front group, the International and Interreligious Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), which apparently tricked several members of Congress into attending the March 23 "Crown of Peace" awards at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

After I broke the story on Salon.com last week, subsequent publicity centered around legislators who claimed they were duped into attending the meeting. (The usual method of the IIFWP and Washington Times Foundation -- Moon owns the paper -- is to invite VIP speakers for Day 1 of the conference, photograph them and keep them in the dark about what's to be discussed Day 2.)

"I can definitively say," adds Conallen, "the congressman will never speak at any event where anything remotely like what happened on March 23 occurred."

As Gorenfeld searched further, though, it turned out that Weldon had indeed been fully informed about the day's events. Not only that, this wasn't the first time:

After the pictures finally went through, the story changed to "apparently he was there, but we really had nothing to do with it. … We may have been a Congressional co-host, but we have nothing to do with the agenda, the organization, the scheduling, and our role would be limited explicitly to the attendance of the Congressman."

Not so, as it turned out. While Weldon's office maintains there was no way of knowing Moon would be there, a March 8 invitation stated that Moon and his wife "will also be recognized that evening for their lifelong work to promote interfaith cooperation and reconciliation," according to the Washington Post.

Seoul, mid-February 2002: The U.S. is at war, but Weldon is at the IIFWP's Assembly 2002 festivities, according to several Unification Church Web sites. His appearance, says his office, was related to his historic delegation to North Korea, though it wasn't on the same trip.

Speaking there was Chung Hwan Kwak, the president of the UPI wire service, the man who was in charge, according to estranged Moon daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, when members of the D.C. church were imprisoned and beaten by a man Moon believed to be the reincarnation of his son. Kwak tells the Seoul audience about a "culture of true love." Moon then gives a speech identifying the "Four Conditions for World Peace." The next day, Weldon speaks at the event, which, like most Moon events, is an exercise in making the founder look like the greatest man on earth.

"For decades," says Steve Hassan, a former group member who's now a self-described cult counselor, "Moon recruiters have deceptively lured people to isolated workshop settings and indoctrinated them to believe that they should renounce their own family and become a member of the "True Family.'"

On Nov. 22, 2002, Weldon was a keynote speaker at the IIFWP's U.S.-U.N. symposium, according to the IIFWP site. The site claimed the speech foreshadowed Weldon's partnership with U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis, a Democrat from Illinois, which would see both praising the IIFWP's "Ambassadors for Peace" on the floor of Congress on June 19, 2003.

In April 2003, while the country's eyes were on Iraq, two things happened. One, a remarkable new edition of the church's Unification News came out. Two, Weldon spoke at an IIFWP symposium in New York.

The church newsletter described cross-removal hitting its stride, declaring that the painful symbol (painful because it prevents religions from uniting under Moon) was gone from 123 church walls. ("The Congressman does not accept or support any of Rev. Moon's teachings or beliefs," explained Conallen cautiously. "That statement certainly applies to any specific attacks or insults against the Christian faith.") And at the conference, held at the Moon-owned New Yorker Hotel, Weldon spoke about the United Nations.

Money from these events, according to Conallen, wasn't pocketed by Weldon, but went to pay for the Michael Horrocks Playground Fund, named for a 9/11 pilot. Today, Weldon remains listed on the Pennsylvania Parents Day nominating committee of Moon's American Family Coalition. As the Washington City Paper revealed in its 1995 story "Honor Thy Parents: How the Unification Church Convinced the U.S. Government to Endorse Its Holiday Honoring the Rev. and Mrs. Moon as the True Parents of Mankind," Parents Day is yet another way to glorify Moon, while pretending to honor others.

As Chris Bowers at MyDD points out, Weldon actually pinned a medal on Moammar Ghadafi at the March 23 event.

President Pants-On-Fire

The news today:

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

And that's not all:

Although not reflected in the court papers, two senior government officials said in interviews with National Journal in recent days that Libby has also asserted that Cheney authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq. In some instances, the information leaked was directly discussed with the Vice President, while in other instances Libby believed he had broad authority to release information that would make the case to go to war.

In yet another instance, Libby had claimed that President Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for "Plan of Attack," a book written by Woodward about the run-up to the Iraqi war.

Bush three years ago:

"There's just too many leaks, and if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is." [Bush, 9/30/03]

"I want to know the truth. ... I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers." [Fox News, 10/8/03]

"I'd like to know if somebody in my White House did leak sensitive information." [Bush, 10/28/03

I'm sure footage of these fibs exist. I wonder if they'll get as much play as Clinton's finger-wagging Lewinsky denial.

The Minutemen's month

When I pulled up to "Camp LeBas" -- the rural acreage the Minutemen are using for headquarters this month in their operations on the Washington-British Columbia border -- the first time Saturday, I was struck with a brief sense of deja vu, since the setting had the look of the Montana Freemen compound in miniature: the rough edges; the clusters of cars, RVs, and trailers; the flags and signs.

The Freemen place was more spread out, by far; the Minutemen have several neighbors right across the road and others just above and below them on the hill, while the Freemen's nearest neighbors were not even visible from the place. Still, the look of the place reminded me not just of the Clark ranch in Jordan but a dozen other "Patriot" properties I visited in the 1990s, from Cal Greenup's to Bo Gritz's: slightly chaotic, slightly grubby, but strategically situated.

I especially took note of the flags, since one of them -- a "Don't Tread on Me" Revolutionary War flag -- was identical to one that John Trochmann used to sell through the Militia of Montana, while the second flag was a military one:


As I took the photos from the roadway on Sunday, a Minuteman official -- Gary Cole, the Minutemen's former national director of operations, who you can see standing just outside the trailer, checking me out, in the top photo -- came out to greet me. I pulled in the driveway and got out to talk.

I wound up chatting with Cole, a glib and pleasant man, for a good 45 minutes, during which time he more or less regaled me with a presentation about the Minutemen he'd obviously given a number of other times. He continually emphasized that the organization's prime concern was with border-control issues.

Cole admitted to me that a border watch on the Canadian border wasn't really going to be about catching illegal aliens as they attempted to cross surreptitiously. What the Minutemen were about, he said, was "making a statement."

It was also clear that "making a statement" entailed attracting as much media attention as possible, which meant that they were far more media-friendly than the militias and Freemen ever were. They were quite successful, too; there were Seattle TV news stations there, and a variety of newspapermen too. They kept track of how many reporters they'd talked with that weekend, and they carefully tailored their talk for the cameras and tape recorders.

After I finished chatting with Cole, I talked for awhile with Tom Williams, leader of the Bellingham Minuteman contingent, inside the outfit's operations center, which was located inside the smallish equipment shed. Coffee and doughnuts were spread out on a table, and a map showing the border watch locations was spread across a wall.

Williams, who was involved with last April's Minuteman Project in Arizona (he says he was charged with weeding out white supremacists) is a pleasant and straightforward-seeming fellow. He was even more insistent about emphasizing border-security issues, and was likewise adamant that he had nothing against Latino immigrants.

For all the resemblance they bore to the Patriots on the outside, inside the Minutemen's compound things were remarkably different. There was none of the paranoia and anger that hung in the air like a fetid smell at Patriot compounds. It was jovial, friendly, and seemingly well organized.

That same feeling prevailed when I talked with the Minuteman volunteers. One of them, a retiree named Larry Pullar who lived in the nearby town of Custer, manned one of the outposts next to the Canadian border where, it was apparent, someone could just walk across a grassy ditchway between two roadways to cross the border.

Pullar was clear that what drove him to join the Minutemen was his concern about the lack of border security, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He said he has nothing against Latino immigrants and is not concerned about them.

I asked Pullar about the Minuteman leadership and their national advocates, who do emphasize those issues. He said he hadn't paid any attention to them; he was in this to push for more secure borders. He seemed sincere.

The Minutemen had attracted about some 22 border-watch volunteers, and a number of support people, to the camp for the weekend, most of them from the region. Most of them were like Pullar. Indeed, it was remarkable that, in all of my discussions that weekend, the only person who was interested in talking about Latino immigration was Gary Cole -- who, as it happened, was all too happy to expound on the notion that illegal Mexican immigrants constituted an "invasion" of America.

It was clear that they were all "on message," that is, to keep emphasizing border-security issues, because those enabled them to steer clear of the rising charges of racism. And indeed, if that was all that the Minutemen were really about, they might have some legitimate points to make (even if their concerns might be overstated).

But you don't have to look far to see that the border-security issue is more of a ruse than a reality. Because from the very top, the advocacy for the Minutemen has come from quarters where the primary concern is about the supposed evils of illegal Latino immigration.

This begins with national organizations like VDare and American Patrol, who concocted the Minuteman idea as an adaptation of the old white-supremacist and militia tactic of border militias. And it continues right down to the state level, where Minuteman supporters are proposing draconian measures aimed at eliminating health care and emergency services to illegal aliens:

Washington voters may be asked to decide in November whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to receive public benefits.

Bob Baker, a Mercer Island resident who heads a group called Protect Washington Now, has filed an initiative to force the state to deny illegal immigrants benefits like those in a handful of programs administered by the Department of Social and Health Services.

Baker volunteers with the Minuteman Project, which got its start in Arizona two years ago to spot and report illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.

This reality belies the Minutemen's savvy public-relations efforts, and is the real reason for an opposition campaign that likewise has formed in Whatcom County:

"The reason this has escalated to such a national level is because of groups like the Minutemen project that are out there causing fear, pain, and frankly pushing people to the limits," said Rosalinda Guillen, director of the Aguila Del Norte Legal Observer Program for the Coalition for Professional Law and Border Enforcement.

The Aguila Del Norte legal observers are there because "we've been getting second-, third-, fourth-hand information from the sheriff, the media. We want to get the information ourselves," she said.

The program will monitor Minutemen, watching for aggressive or harassing tactics that target Latinos. She said that four to six observers visited Minutemen border sites over the weekend.

"We still believe this is an extremist group, it's racially motivated," Guillen said.

Guillen is far from alone in this belief, and it's certainly a well-founded one. Juan Santos at Dissident Voice recently explored the way the Minutemen are reviving old-style nativism, and how the recent pro-immigrant rallies have been the first wave of opposition to them:

Minutemen co-leader Chris Simcox would have us believe that "we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them [migrants] up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these people as mere crackpots. The problem with that analysis however is clear. These people have power. They've dominated and defined the debate on immigration for the past year, at least until this past weekend, when well over a million -- even two million people -- marched in opposition to their xenophobic and persecutorial dementia.

Southern California activists have seen that racist dementia up close, time and again, as we confronted the Minutemen and their allies in an effort to keep things from ever getting this far.

We saw it in the eyes of breakaway Minuteman leader James Chase in the darkness of the southern desert at midnight, he armed with a shotgun, we with nothing but our bare hearts.

We saw it in the eyes of Minuteman supporter Hal Netkin as he slammed his car into a crowd of mostly Chicano protestors as Jim Gilchrist addressed the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Gilchrist joined the Coalition, which has been identified as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Painted as American a hero by the likes of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gilchrist has been accused by a former campaign volunteer of integrating Nazi activists into his campaign for Congress. He lost the special election, despite his endorsement by Sensenbrenner ally Tancredo.

But he put fear into Republican politicians -- fear that incumbents would face vote draining, immigrant bashing third party candidates in November if they didn't take a ard right line against migrants. They feared Gilchrist sympathizers like the rightist California group Save Our State, which has regularly drawn organized Nazis to their protests, and which uses the exact rhetoric used by open white nationalists and supremacists, such as calling Mexican culture a "cesspool".

The corporate media, informed time and again of Nazi, white nationalist and militia connections to the anti-migrant movement, has continued to paint the anti-migrants as part of a mainstream. Gilchrist himself has claimed he has "240 million" supporters, despite the fact that the anti-immigrant movement as a whole could field only 700 activists for its "National Day of Protest" this year. They were outnumbered 10 to 1 wherever they turned across the country.

Even so, Tancredo, Sensenbrenner and the extreme, racist right wing elements they represent were on the verge of a major legislative victory. They were so close they could taste it.

Until Sunday.

Nonetheless, the Minutemen are claiming that that the rallies have actually stirred a backlash that will bolster their support:

Within 48 hours of the 20,000-strong march in Phoenix, the Arizona-based Minuteman Civil Defense Corps signed up about 300 new volunteers for patrols along the U.S.-Mexican border, said Chris Simcox, the organization's leader.

Today, volunteers plan to kick off a monthlong border watch in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas and report undocumented immigrants to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Simcox said the pro-immigrant rallies "really went a long way to awaken the sleeping giant in America."

"People are just astounded," he said. "They had no idea about the number of illegals in the country."

Nationally, major organizations that push for tighter immigration controls have been flooded with sometimes-alarming phone calls from people upset about the mass demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters, some waving the Mexican flag, into the streets of Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago.

... Susan Tully, national field director for the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates reducing illegal immigration, said her office has been "overwhelmed" with phone calls from frustrated people looking for a way to get involved in a counterprotest.

Tully said she has been alarmed by some of the calls and urged restraint and caution.

"I can tell you the frustration you can hear in their voices and the outrage. It's pretty scary," she said.

"I really think the best way for the American public to oppose this guest-worker plan at this point is to continue to make phone calls, faxes, write and go visit U.S. senators and representatives rather than taking to the streets."

She also worried about how pro-immigrant demonstrators are interacting with members of FAIR and other anti-illegal immigration organizations.

"I promise you if we announced tomorrow that we were going to have a march in Los Angeles or Phoenix, the other side would be out there to confront them, and it could get really ugly," Tully said.

It certainly looks that way, especially considering the kind of fresh support that the "backlash" seems to be producing. Check, for instance, the White Revolution Web site, where the posts all prominently play up those Mexican flags and, moreover a plan for "Anti-Invasion Day" events across America on April 10:

Will you just sit idly by on this historic day and allow the mestizo hordes to claim America as theirs? Then stand with us, for Race and Nation and let's Take America Back Now!

April 10th: Anti-Invasion Day

Bush calls for civil debate ...

Illegal immigrants push for civil war ...

White Revolution calls for nationwide patriotic display on April 10th!

Tens of thousands of illegal invaders and their treasonous collaborators are calling for a national "Day of Action" on Monday, April 10th, to support illegal immigration.

In response, White Revolution is calling for a national day of patriotic expression against illegal immigration on the same day.

You can wear an American flag t-shirt or baseball cap. A lapel pin, or tie. A red, white, and blue ribbon. Even an American flag sticker. There are many ways that you can show your support for this great country our ancestors built with their sweat and blood. Wherever you are, whatever you will be doing, stand with us on April 10th, to demonstrate against illegal immigration and the invasion of our nation.

Mark your calendars, now! April 10th: red, white, blue, and you!

I believe people like Larry Pullar and Tom Williams are sincere about not wanting to be associated with this kind of element, and not just because it makes them look bad. As with the militia movement in the 1990s, the Minutemen's success has been predicated on its ability to draw in people from mainstream America, largely by disguising their larger agenda and promoting themselves in a way that appeals to mainstream concerns (in this case, about keeping our borders secure).

But they seem not to stop and question why it is that their organization actually attracts neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and various ill-disguised hate groups whose existence is predicated on scapegoating racial minorities. If they did, the answer would be a simple one: Whatever concern the Minuteman leadership might actually have regarding border security is inextricably bound up with their belief that Latino immigrants are harming American culture.

In the end, the Minuteman vision of "border security" is just a pretext for "keeping the Latinos out." The Minutemen attract these elements because their agenda is only a vague reformulation of a major component of the traditional white-supremacist program for America.

They're not fooling the racists. They're only fooling their mainstream recruits -- and a blinkered press.

Those lazy Mexicans

Rush Limbaugh, on his March 27 radio show:

I mean if -- if you had a -- a -- a renegade, potential criminal element that was poor and unwilling to work, and you had a chance to get rid of 500,000 every year, would you do it?

The first time I encountered Mexican workers was in 1975, when I came home to Idaho Falls from college in Moscow, Idaho, looking for work for the summer. The first place I could find that would hire me was a potato warehouse out on Lindsey Boulevard, next to the rail tracks.

Most of my co-workers were from Mexico, were likely illegal immigrants, and most of them spoke only Spanish. But they were friendly and tried to help me and my friend Scott, who had also gotten a job there. We both towered over them, and we were both in pretty good shape; I was 18 at the time, and had spent the previous summers hauling pipe in potato fields, so I knew what hard work was about. But we weren't quite prepared for this work.

Basically, the job entailed loading 100- and 50-pound gunny sacks of potatoes into rail cars: stacking them onto a dolly, rolling them into the car, and stacking them up. This is a reasonable job when the stack is less than chest high, but loading them over our heads was a real test.

After two weeks, I failed it. I was completely exhausted and broken down by the end of that time. I called in, said thanks for the opportunity, and quit. (So did Scott.) I wound up setting up my own house-painting business that summer and making my tuition that way.

But I'm sure that most of those Latino co-workers not only stayed on, they probably worked at the warehouse year-round. Because they were simply unfazed by it all. They could load, stack, and load some more, all of it far more efficiently than I ever could. And at the end of every day, as I collapsed in a heap, they were still in good spirits.

Not only were they the hardest-working people I ever met, they also had the best work ethic I ever saw. That is, not only did they work hard, they worked smart. I muscled those 100-pound sacks of spuds up to the top row, while they simply tossed them up with a little leverage and technique.

Oh, and my old boss back at the potato farm where I hauled pipe? Within a couple of years after I left that farm, he went to an all-Latino crew, and he admitted to me that they were mostly illegals. But, he said, they worked harder and better and far more reliably than any crew of teenagers ever had for him. Having been one of those teenagers, I knew exactly what he meant.

Since then, I have had many other encounters with immigrant Latino workers -- as well as many working-class people living in Mexico -- and my experience has been uniform. These are hard-working, decent people. America can use more people like them.

Yes, they are often poor, and poverty does spawn crime. But the notion that they are innately criminal is absurd.

And the notion that they are lazy? On what planet?

But reading Limbaugh's rant, the big question that lingers is: How does he propose "getting rid" of 500,000 illegal immigrants annually?

Waving that flag

Right-wingers are all up in arms over the Mexican flags that have been prominently displayed during the recent immigration demonstrations.

Michelle Malkin especially has worked herself up to a fine froth, while UberWanker Mickey Kaus has been doing the same. We've heard similar refrains from Jed Babbin, hosting Hugh Hewitt's show.

Some of the more, ahem, creative responses have included Michael Savage's ("Burn the Mexican flag!") and those mental wizards at Wizbang, who suggest we "shoot it off the pole."

Then I noticed this in an L.A. Times piece on Bush and the immigration issue:

During the 2000 election, Bush previewed a campaign video from ad-maker Lionel Sosa that used emotion-laden themes to woo Latinos.

As he watched, Sosa recalled, Bush's face lighted up. "How much do you need for this?" Bush asked as the two men sat with Rove in the governor's mansion in Texas, Sosa said.

Sosa replied that it would take $3 million. According to the ad-maker, Bush then turned to Rove, saying: "Give him five."

Four years later, Sosa produced a variation of that video for the 2004 campaign that was mailed to Latino voters across the country.

The video includes images that would probably rile those who today are calling for the most restrictive immigration laws. At one point, Bush is shown waving a Mexican flag. The footage was shot, Sosa said, during a Mexican Independence Day parade in San Antonio in 1998, when Bush was running for reelection as governor.

Funny that none of these people were offended by Bush's earlier gesture. Guess it all depends on who's doing the waving, right?

WATBs of the Week

Dori Monson, with Stefan Sharkansky in a supporting role.

Forget for a moment how incredibly dishonest it is for Dori to spend an hour disparaging the Democratic Party based on the barroom conversation of a handful of bloggers. The very fact that Stefan and Dori have decided to ignore the very serious topics we discussed and instead focus on our less than solemn language tells you how desperate they are to change the subject from the failed Bush administration and the rubber stamp Republican majority that props it up.

Well, fuck them. The whole point of recording the podcast in a bar is to try to capture the kind of spontaneous conversation and debate that makes Drinking Liberally such an intellectually satisfying and entertaining event. If Dori wants to get all sanctimonious with his screened calls and his feigned outrage, that's up to him. Hell ... he's the "professional."

Funny that Monson can get all worked up when a few Democrats podcasting from a bar and making jokes use the 'F' word, but he utters nary a peep when Vice President Dick Cheney tells a U.S. senator on the floor of the Senate to "go fuck himself."

TalkCheck has the audio. Josh Feit has more.

Tancredo Takes Aim

The 2006 midterm elections haven't even been held yet, and already the jockeying is beginning for the 2008 presidential race, particularly among Republicans. One name that deserves close watching is Tom Tancredo, the Colorado congressman who is trying to ride a wave of resurgent nativism regarding Latino immigrants all the way to the White House.

In addition to the anti-immigrant legislation he's spearheaded, he's been appearing regularly on national news shows as the voice of the extreme right on immigration, including his recent ABC appearance in which he attacked Hillary Clinton for citing Scripture. Tancredo also is frequently a runner-up in online polls for the Republican nomination, which mostly means that he's developing a devoted following. Already, there's an unofficial Tancredo for President site, and he's a favorite presidential contender among the Free Republic set.

The reason that Tancredo is worrisome is that he is a classic right-wing transmitter, someone who straddles both the extremist and mainstream realms and injects far-right ideas into the mainstream while pursuing a similar agenda.

The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel remarked on this the other day in a fashion that sent NewsMax atwitter:

"Tancredo, on your show today -- he looked pleasant. But I will say that what's happened in our country is that some of the white supremacist thinking that used to be represented by David Duke has been absorbed by people like Tancredo."

Tancredo has been Latino-bashing for years, including his remarks claiming that some illegal immigrants are "coming here to kill you and to kill me and our families." He consistently characterizes the current wave of immigrants as "an invasion," including at his appearance at the Minuteman Project kickoff last April in Arizona.

More recently, an NPR report carried these remarks from Tancredo:

"We have a war! We are facing a military on the other side of the border -- an armed military -- who periodically come into the United States of America... armed, threatening our people, threatening the border patrol."

As Across the Great Divide observes:

He's referring apparently to a border incident in which a county sheriff chasing drug dealers watched an olive colored Humvee come from the Mexican side bearing men wearing military-style uniforms who evacuated one of drug runners' SUVs when it got stuck in the river. (One more strike against SUVs!) The U.S. State Dept. says these were not members of the military, but known members of a narco-trafficking ring that employs military-style uniforms, equipment and tactics.

Despite being grounded largely in right-wing nativist hooey, even supposedly mainstream conservative publications like Human Events take him seriously:

One of the big issues facing voters in this year's midterm congressional elections will be border security. The federal government has not done a good job in protecting the U.S. border with Mexico and to paraphrase a famous line in the movie "Network," Americans living along that Mexican border are "mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore."

We have seen some Americans taking action. The "Minutemen" group comes to mind. The U.S. Border Patrol can't be everywhere and the "Minutemen" are a good group of citizens who have decided to do something about it instead of just sitting around talking about it.

It seems that the only member of Congress who has had the guts to fight this illegal immigration has been Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, and his district isn't even on the Mexican border.

Just recently, Tancredo announced he wants to push for provisions that would expand and strengthen House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner's immigration reform bill. In particular, Tancredo wants a series of border security provisions get an up or down floor vote by House members.

Notably, Bush' proposal for a "guest worker" program goes over like a lead balloon with this crowd:

What really puzzles me is why President Bush is being so touchy-feely on this. I think I know the reason why. Bush, like many other Republicans, does not want to be perceived as a racist. The GOP wants those Hispanic voters voting Republican, and I would imagine if the President said something tough about border security, the Hispanics would vote Democratic. Something they normally do anyway.

Also, the President probably does not want to alienate Mexico and his friend President Vicente Fox. Mexico hasn't lifted a finger in trying to stop illegal immigrants. NAFTA, CAFTA and all these other trade agreements hasn't shifted the Mexican government stance on stopping illegal immigration. Trade agreements do nothing but cost Americans their jobs.

Of course, this is a publication that hawks J.D. Hayworth's anti-immigrant tome, Whatever It Takes, with headlines like "Invasion Overwhelming Southwest Border". So perhaps this isn't so surprising.

Nor, for that matter, is Tancredo's loose-cannon schtick. It isn't reserved simply to domestic policy. Last year, he suggested we nuke Muslim shrines in retaliation for Islamist terror attacks -- a suggestion that no doubt was a hit with our Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani allies.

It certainly isn't a surprise that corporate donors are staying away in droves, which normally might doom a candidate:

Big Business, it seems, is running away from Congressman Tom Tancredo. And Tancredo doesn't care.

As the fourth-term Republican representative has become a national figurehead in an increasingly vocal anti-immigration movement, an army of individuals from across the country is pouring cash into his campaign chest -- making up for dwindling contributions from business interests, who, according to Tancredo, "are not served by my attempt to restrict the flow of cheap labor."

Most of these individual donors don't live in his congressional district, which covers the southern Denver metro area. Many don't live in Colorado, for that matter.

"Ninety-nine percent are giving on the basis of the immigration issue," Tancredo tells the Independent.

That's not so surprising, really, since Big Business is a Big Fan of Bush's guest-worker proposal. And for good cause, since it would be the realization of their wet dream: a labor force that cannot vote.

Perhaps more telling is that churches are openly condemning him:

Various religious groups have lined up against the House-passed bill, which calls for building a fence along portions of the U.S.-Mexico border, plus tougher enforcement against illegal immigrants and those who employ them.

The Washington, D.C., office of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) issued an alert to members saying, "This enforcement-only bill is anti- immigrant, unfair, and unjust."

Elenora Giddings Ivory, of the denomination's Stewardship of Public Life advocacy program, said the church's position on immigration is based on the scripture passage Matthew 25, verses 31-46, which talks about nations being judged, in part, by how they treat strangers.

"We have a position that supports compassionate immigration policy. So any bill that comes forward and does not fit with a compassionate understanding of immigration policy would be held up to that," Giddings Ivory said.

To which Tancredo replied:

"The faith community must step forward and tell leftist activists that undermining border security is not a religious imperative," Tancredo said.

"I call on the conservative majority of churchgoers to contact the activists who are misrepresenting their beliefs."

Tancredo's anti-immigrant campaign, in truth, runs directly counter to the spirit of Christianity, as the later spat with Hillary suggests. It's not hard, after all, to find passages telling Christians to help the poor and feed the hungry. It's much harder to find passages demanding border security.

But don't expect such considerations to even cross the field of vision of a demagogue who has his eye trained on winning the presidency. It's a divide-and-conquer stragegy. Tancredo is not likely at all to win, but he's likely to inflict a lot of damage along the way -- particularly when it comes to finding ways to tear us apart.

That racism thang

Max Blumenthal has an excellent piece up at The Nation regarding how conservatives have co-opted so much of the longtime white supremacist agenda that now the extremist right is looking for new ways to attract followers:

Back in those good old times, in 1982, explaining the Klan's anti-immigrant advocacy, Duke said, "Every new immigrant adds to our crime problems, our welfare rolls and unemployment of American citizens.... We are being invaded in the southwest as if a foreign army were coming over the border.... They're going to take more and more hard-earned money from the productive middle class in the form of taxes and social programs." And Duke called for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants and harsh penalties for businesses that employ them. "I'd make the Mexican-American border almost like a Maginot line," he said, referring to the militarized barrier France constructed between itself, Italy and Germany after World War I.

At the time, Duke was widely dismissed as little more than a turbo-charged version of the paranoid style--"the Klan's answer to Robert Redford," as reporter Patty Sims described him in 1978. But today his anti-immigration rhetoric sounds not so remote from one of top-rated CNN host Lou Dobbs's fulminations during his daily "Broken Borders" segment. Duke's Klan Border Watch, meanwhile, served as the forerunner and inspiration of the Dobbs-touted Minutemen groups that have proliferated from the Mexico border to Herndon, Virginia, the city that hosted the American Renaissance conference, where disgruntled locals hold regular protests outside a day-labor center. Under pressure from Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, chair of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, and with sponsorship from House Judiciary Committee chair James Sensenbrenner (tough-talking heir to the Kotex fortune), the Republican-dominated House has approved a bill that makes it a felony to be in the United States illegally, mandates punishment for providing aid or shelter to undocumented immigrants and allocates millions for the construction of an iron wall between the United States and Mexico. Duke may have fallen short on the national stage, but his old notions have gained a new life through new political figures.

"Tancredo, he's pretty good. I would probably vote for him for President," Duke told me.

For self-proclaimed white nationalists, however, the mainstreaming of some of their ideas has created new challenges. "Immigration was the white nationalist movement's hot issue, but it's really left beyond them," said Devin Burghart, director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group. "They've gone through this before, where they've had to reinvent themselves. Now, they're searching for a new issue to take them forward."

The clearest example of the way these far-right memes have invaded the conservative mainstream is provided by Michelle Malkin, particularly in her latest column:

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Autum Ashante, the precocious 7-year-old black nationalist poet, who said white people are "devils and they should be gone." If this daughter of a Nation of Islam activist father had instead been an Aryan supremacist child of a Klan activist, she'd still be all over the network news and pages of pop culture magazines (as a pair of white nationalist teen pop singers, Lamb and Lynx Gaede, have been since last fall). But with rare exceptions, nobody wanted to touch Autum's spoon-fed hatred with a 10-foot-pole. That would be, you know, "intolerant." We have to "respect diversity."

Of course, it always helps to understand that the Nation of Islam is also widely considered to be a racist hate group, and in fact is designated that by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that the daughter of one of the group's leaders is penning racist poetry. And saying so is the opposite of "intolerant."

It should also be noted that her characterization of the treatment of the Gaede twins neglects to mention that their story was originally presented in Teen People without any mention of the fact that they are neo-Nazis.

But the really egregious stuff is what follows:

Aztlan is a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class, which asserts that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico. Advocates believe the reclamation (or reconquista) of Aztlan will occur through sheer demographic force. If the rallies across the country are any indication, reconquista is already complete.

The problem is, as I've pointed out previously, the whole notion of "reconquista" as a plot to invade America is just another far-right conspiracy theory that has floated about among extremists for years and is now surfacing, like the fetid turd of an idea it is, in the mainstream punch bowl.

Alex Koppelman at Dragonfire explores this point in some depth:

You might expect Malkin to give her readers some evidence that Aztlan really is "a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class," but she never does.

Why? Because Aztlan and reconquista these days aren't, for the most part, ideas held by Mexicans: they're ideas held by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The myth of reconquista stems from a misreading of one of the founding documents of the Chicano movement, "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan."

In much the same way that the Black Power movement meant the words "Black Power" in a metaphorical sense, that is, as a call to African-Americans to recognize after years of being stigmatized that they too were people with something to contribute to society, "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" was an appeal to nationalism as a means to achieve a greater self-awareness and self-esteem.

But that's not the way some white supremacists, fearful of a brown mass ready to take over the United States, has interpreted it.

A simple Google search shows that the people talking about Aztlan and reconquista are predominantly not Mexican (though there are some radical fringe groups) but white supremacists.

Moreover, as I explained in some depth, it's really a fairly simple thing to distinguish racist hate groups from ethnic-heritage groups: the former are almost exclusively obsessed with degrading and demonizing "out" groups, while the latter are largely about lifting up and promoting the group they represent (this is, in fact, the chief factor in the SPLC's "hate group" designations). Just as the Klan reveals itself more through its actions than its words, so do groups like MEChA:

For those who would argue that a group like MEChA is only nascent in its racism, and could eventually wreak such horrors if its agenda flamed out of control, it is worth remembering that racist organizations nearly always display their true colors almost immediately. The Klan, as just seen, was violent and terroristic from the start; so, too, were the European fascists, particularly during the fascista and SA years.

And what has MEChA done? Advocate for increasing the numbers of Latinos in higher education. Organize student rallies. Emphasize self-determination.

Here is how one commenter named "cat" on Atrios' boards put it:

MeCHA has been an integral part of student life for decades; many, if not most, of my Chicano friends and acquaintances were involved with it; it was then and probably is now an advocacy organization which worked to bring Chicanos (now Latinos) into the educational institutions, to feed and clothe underprivileged children in the community, including those of the migrant farmworkers, was involved with Caesar Chavez in advocating for better working conditions for the migrant workers, and provided tutoring, mentoring, and fellowship for students, as do many other student organizations.

This view is one expressed consistently by people who have experience with MEChA. Among these is O. Ricardo Pimentel, a columnist for the Arizona Republic, who recently penned a column addressing the current campaign from the right, "California coup plays a race card on Bustamante":

But let us acknowledge that MEChA was born in the racial turmoil and rhetoric leading up to 1969. Its founding historical documents, El Plan de Aztlan and El Plan de Santa Barbara, contain incendiary language.

But the truth is, few joining even back then were thinking of overthrowing government. They were talking about changing society, for the better.

"We all understood the history of MEChA," says Loredo, a MEChA president at Phoenix College in 1987. "We took it in the context of the times, 1969 (the founding year)."

To liberate Aztlan, Loredo and other MEChistas pushed to get more Latinos into college and performed community service. Many, like Bustamante, entered public service.

MEChA elsewhere also led walkouts and protests to form Chicano studies programs and to push for more Chicano faculty hires.

Indeed, Republicans who wish to push the argument that MEChA is racist might want to talk to Mike Madrid, an advisor to the GOP on Latino affairs (and someone for whom this meme is probably the biggest nightmare since Proposition 187), who had this to say in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

"It's bizarre to assume this is some kind of radical group, seeking to overthrow part of the United States," said Mike Madrid, who has worked on Latino affairs for the state Republican Party. "It was part of the Brown Beret and Chicano studies movement, but it's mainly a social group and has been for years. To suggest it's involved in paramilitary training or some underhanded conspiracy is ludicrous."

In spite of this, Malkin goes on to argue:

Apologists are quick to argue that Latino supremacists are just a small fringe faction of the pro-illegal immigration movement (never mind that their ranks include former and current Hispanic politicians from L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to former California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante).

But you'll never hear or read such forgiving caveats in the mainstream press's hostile coverage of the pro-immigration enforcement members of the Minutemen Project—who are universally smeared as racists. For what? For peacefully demanding that our government enforce its laws and secure its borders.

Actually, the Minutemen are not "smeared" as racists for peacefully demanding that our government enforce its laws and secure it borders.

They're accurately described as racists and extremists because their ranks are riddled throughout with racists and extremists, something similarly reflected in their leadership. Because their agenda and their rhetoric is predicated on demonizing Hispanics. Because of their origins in the militia movement. Because their vigilantism is the mark not of civic activists, but of violent extremists.

But then, it's not surprising that Malkin continues to defend the Minutemen while continuing to spread far-right conspiracy theories. After all, this is part of a well-established pattern:

Malkin, in fact, has numerous dalliances with right-wing extremists -- the real ones that she claims conservatives are busy policing.

The most vivid instance of this is her long association with VDare, which has been designated a hate group by the SPLC, and for good cause:

Fast forward to 2003. Once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page, VDARE has now become a meeting place for many on the radical right.

One essay complains about how the government encourages "the garbage of Africa" to come to the United States. The same writer says once the "Mexican invasion" engulfs the country, "high teenage birthrates, poverty, ignorance and disease will be what remains."

Another says that Hispanics have a "significantly higher level of social pathology than American whites. ... In other words, some immigrants are better than others." Yet another complains that a Jewish immigrant rights group is helping "African Muslim refugees" come to America.

Brimelow's site carries archives of columns from men like Sam Francis, who is the editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group whose Web page recently described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

It has run articles by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in dubious race and IQ studies and eugenics, the "science" of "race betterment" through selective breeding.

As I've said before, Malkin's In Defense of Internment is likewise of a piece of this same willingness to indulge views that are by any measure bigoted, and in some cases, extremist, by ignoring the latent bigotry and its broader ramifications.

These are hardly the only instances. Let's not forget her link in a blog post to an anti-immigrant site operated by an extremist Holocaust-denial organization. (The link is still up.)

Then there are the Minutemen, hailed by Malkin as "the mother of all neighborhood watch programs", and defended with regularity on her blog. As I've observed numerous times, the Minutemen are a magnet for the most extreme racists and xenophobes in America, and their claims to be "weeding out" such extremists are so much hooey.

After all, not only is the Minuteman Project directly descended from the militia movement, the Minuteman leader have a history of extremism. And they haven't changed their stripes, their media makeover notwithstanding. Jim Gilchrist, one of the Minuteman Project cofounders, is currently running for Congress under the banner of the far-right Constitution Party -- which itself is closely bound up with promoting the militia movement. And then there are the charming folks who show up for Minuteman parties.

Given Malkin's extraordinarily high tolerance for right-wing extremism -- indeed, her open participation in advancing their agenda -- it's probably not any wonder that the presence of right-wing extremism, and its positive embrace by the mainstream conservative movement, is simply left out of her narrative.

After all, if you think racial hygienists like Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer and the rest of the VDare gang are "normal," well, then what "real extremists on the right" remain for people like Michelle Malkin to denounce?

Malkin has never explained her continued association with VDare, and it's plain why. Much of her career of the past five years has been built on these associations. Playing a bogus race card is a handy way of disguising that.

Perhaps Malkin can spare us the lectures on racism -- at least until she explains her own behavior. Maybe then we'll have some sense whether she actually understands what racism is about.

The Freemen, 10 years later

[FBI headquarters at the Garfield County fairgrounds, March 1996.]

Really, it doesn't seem like it was ten years ago that I was freezing my ass off standing out in the eastern Montana plains watching a lot of other journalists do nothing but freeze their asses off, waiting for something, anything to happen at the Freemen compound near Brusett, just outside of Jordan.

But damn, it was. Anything since then has been fun in comparison, so that may explain why time has flown by.

The Billings Gazette has put together an excellent retrospective on the 81-day standoff (still the longest in law-enforcement history) that brings us all up to date on some of the characters in the drama.

The elderly ranchers on whose property the standoff occurred served their sentences and have returned to the county, but the property is no longer theirs. Most of the radical "Freemen" themselves who were responsible for the standoff are still in prison, though a few are due to get out soon. (See the sidebar on the main piece.)

Be sure to check out the reminscences of my friend Clair Johnson, who covered the standoff from start to finish (unlike me, who spent only 14 days or so there). I relied on Clair's reporting a lot for my book on the standoff, In God's Country. Clair's talk comes with a nice slide show.

Certainly, the thing I remember best about the standoff were the journalists I met on my first day in Jordan who'd had their gear hijacked by the Freemen. They'd made the mistake of driving down the road past the Clark place, where the Freemen had put together a sentry post (complete with shooting positions) atop a hill overlooking the road, from which they would drive down and harass people. It was still there the following summer when I photographed it:


The other memorable part of this was watching the Freemen in court, expounding on their constitutionalist gobbledygook and frazzling the nerves of the normally decorous federal judges. You can get an idea for what I'm talking about by reading one of the many signs they posted around their properties. This photo is of a sign taken from the original Freemen compound near Roundup (click on the image for a larger version):



In any event, the Gazette package is a worthy reminder that it really wasn't all that long ago that right-wing extremists were talking about revolution, threatening and sometimes killing federal officials, law enforcement officers, and innocent bystanders, attacking mainstream American values, and committing acts of domestic terrorism serially.

It's also worth remembering that they really haven't gone away, either. It seems that Democratic presidents in particular inspire their deepest paranoias; the next one is pretty certain to bring them back out of the woodwork, and perhaps stronger than ever.

Blast from the past

I was reading all about Alec Baldwin's run-in with Sean Hannity last night when I got one of those little shots of deja vu all over again:

On Sunday evening, at the suggestion of a friend of mine who works inside the NY radio broadcast community, I guest-hosted Brian Whitman's talk show on WABC radio, which was, ultimately, hijacked by talk-show host Sean Hannity, who called in and demanded to be heard. He was accompanied by another ABC Talk Radio host, Mark Levin, someone I had never heard of before that evening.

After some back and forth between myself and Hannity, most of it predictable, Levin made a comment connected to my divorce proceedings. I turned to Whitman, who knew that I was due to depart the show no later than 8:30 PM New York time anyway, and told him I had to go. I thought that Levin, whoever he may be and whatever code he does or does not operate by, had crossed a line and I was under no obligation to continue in that vein.

Alec Baldwin may not remember Mark Levin, but I sure do.

Levin was one of the Republican right's chief talking heads during the Clinton impeachment, especially on MSNBC, where I was working at the time. One of my jobs at the Web site entailed downloading video from our cable shows and putting them up on the site. Levin was on. A lot.

Levin is George Costanza with an endless vicious streak. He's the embodiment of shrillness. He scowls, he sneers, he yells, he bugs his eyes out, his face turns red, he interrupts incessantly, and he makes the nastiest comments imaginable. Most of all, he exudes a simmering but deep-seated hatefulness. If he were a dog, he'd be an ugly poodle-chihuahua mix in a perpetual roid rage. It's hard to imagine anyone more repellent.

And as someone who was tracking what was said on TV and comparing it to the published facts, it was also clear that he was a congenital liar. He had no compunction whatsoever about repeating any kind of falsehood on the air if it would hurt Clinton and advance the cause of impeachment. This included, of course, a lot of nasty personal insinuations about the Clintons' private lives.

Nowadays, as SourceWatch explains, he's the head of Rush Limbaugh's "legal division" (whatever that is). But he also has a history: He was former Attorney General Edwin Meese's chief of staff, and was Meese's attorney during the Iran-Contra investigation.

He was also closely attached with Ted Olson during the 1990s. And as Meese's chief of staff, he also was directly involved in the machinations that got Olson and Edward Schmults off the legal hook regarding their misleading and likely perjurious testimony before Congress.

Nowadays, he even has a fan Web site. And of course, now that a Republican holds the presidency, he finds the opposition to President Bush "far more shrill" than he can remember. I spent a week chortling to myself about that one.

And more recently, he's been busy leading the right-wing attack on the judiciary, even publishing a book with a title (Men in Black Robes) that echoed similar titles from the extreme-right Posse Comitatus folks. Obviously, Sandra Day O'Connor is not one of his fans.

Baldwin got a taste for how viscerally nasty guys like Levin, and so many of these right-wing figures -- including Hannity -- really are. And I bet if he hung around Bill O'Reilly long enough, he'd start to see that side of him as well.

Those criminal immigrants

TalkCheck recently caught KVI-AM radio talk-show host John Carlson -- the 2000 Republican nominee for governor of Washington state -- regurgitating more right-wing scapegoating nonsense regarding Hispanic immigrants, with a nice scent of race-baiting to boot:

CARLSON: I think what bothers people is not that we have Mexicans up here working, but that we have a lot of them staying, and we've seen a rise in crime and the affect on schools and other things, and taxpayer dollars and things like that.

As TalkCheck notes:

There's nothing new about using immigrants as scapegoats for a variety of society's ills, but Carlson managed to break entirely new ground by accusing them of causing a problem that doesn't even exist. Since the mid-nineties there's been nothing but good news about the crime rate in Washington State. In fact, statistics show that violent crime decreased by 30% from 1992 to 2000, a period that saw sustained increases in illegal immigration. Property crime fell by 16% over the same timeframe.

More interestingly, a number of different studies have found that there is no causal relationship between immigration and crime. In fact, those studies have shown that border states actually have a lower crime rate than non-border states.

Ah, but why should we let a few facts stand in the way of a nice ethnic wedge issue?

The immigration conundrum

When you get half a million people marching in the streets to protest Republican immigration policies, you better believe that the political pot is beginning to bubble in time for the 2006 election.

It presents a real conundrum for conservatives, and a real opportunity for progressives. That was clear from the events that sparked this weekend's protests:

Saturday's rally, spurred by anger over legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last December, was part of what many say is an unprecedented effort to organize immigrants and their supporters across the nation. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is to take up efforts Monday to complete work on a comprehensive immigration reform proposal. Unlike the House bill, which beefed up border security and toughened immigration laws, the Senate committee's version is expected to include a guest worker program and a path to legalization for the nation's 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants.

The Associated Press report of the rally noted that the legislation "would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally. It also would impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, require churches to check the legal status of parishioners before helping them and erect fences along one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border."

The Republicans in Congress who spearheaded these measures -- particularly Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin -- represent a resurgent Cro-Magnon wing of the party, one that is threatening to swamp the genteel grip of corporate conservatives whose approach to immigration is decidedly different, if equally poisonous.

The Cro-Magnon approach, embodied by vigilantes like the Minutemen, is to blame the pawns. Their policies are predicated on the laughable idea that we can build a fortress wall around the country and just keep people out, a pretty notion that quickly runs aground on the reality that no wall can contain the larger forces driving illegal immigration. They consistently scapegoat the emigres while ignoring -- and indeed abetting -- those same larger forces.

Mind you, this is an easy issue to whip up public sympathy with majority whites. Latino immigration is creating huge demographic shifts across the country, and as with all such waves of immigration, it's creating real cultural frictions, especially as assimilation bogs down in the sheer mass of the wave.

So what the American far right is doing is appealing to white Americans' base racial instincts: associating the immigrants with crime and disease, accusing them of being part of a "conspiracy," complaining that they're polluting white culture. These are all significant features of the rhetoric used by both the Minutemen and their supporters in Congress.

But as Max Blumenthal points out, these ham-handed attacks on Latinos seem to have awakened the sleeping giant of the American Hispanic vote:

In passing HR 4437 and whatever draconian and utterly counter-productive bill emerges from the Senate, the congressional Republicans have become their party's worst enemy. They have cast their white, Southern base in conflict with the Latino constituency the RNC and the Bush White House realize they must win over if they are ever to achieve a so-called "Republican majority."

The Cro-Magnon approach is repellent enough on its own merits, but the other side of the Republican coin on immigration is the Bush plan to create a "guest worker" program that is nothing less than the realization of corporate America's wet dream of having a labor force that cannot vote. It would create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised workers, and would forever change the very nature of immigration as we have historically known it in America, severing it from citizenship.

This two-headed approach to immigration is like being given a choice of refreshing beverage: arsenic or strychnine. You pick.

It's all part of the ongoing Latin Americanization of the United States, in which the standard of living and the economic and political power of the middle and working classes is consistently driven downward and held there. As PZ Myers puts it, "The Republican agenda is to turn the United States into a third-world shithole."

What's especially insidious about this is that, contrasted with the jingos of the far right, Bush's program looks downright moderate in comparison. But it may be more destructive and, well, evil. As James K. Galbraith explained some time ago:

This program will permit any employer to admit any worker. From any country. At any time. The only requirement is that it be for a job Americans are not willing to take. But it is easy to create such jobs: Cut wages. Terminate the unions. Lengthen the hours. Speed up the lines. Chicken farmers have known this for years. Bush's plan is a blank check for every bad boss this country has.

... For millions of citizen workers, what would happen? The answer is clear: Bad bosses drive out the good. Good bosses will turn bad under pressure. The terms of our jobs would get worse and worse. Who would want a citizen worker? A bracero will be so much cheaper, more loyal, and under control. And who among us, in our right mind, would want to look for work? Unless, of course, we needed to eat. Or pay the mortgage. I am not exaggerating: This is a threat to us all.

Even the centrist Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post castigates the broad-reaching effects of Bush's plan:

Guest workers would mainly legalize today's vast inflows of illegal immigrants, with the same consequence: We'd be importing poverty. This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking; many are. Nor is it because they don't assimilate; many do. But they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished. Since 1980 the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government's poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has risen 162 percent. Over the same period, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty rose 3 percent and the number of blacks, 9.5 percent. What we have now -- and would with guest workers -- is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico. By and large, this is a bad bargain for the United States. It stresses local schools, hospitals and housing; it feeds social tensions (witness the Minutemen). To be sure, some Americans get cheap housecleaning or landscaping services. But if more mowed their own lawns or did their own laundry, it wouldn't be a tragedy.

The most lunatic notion is that admitting more poor Latino workers would ease the labor market strains of retiring baby boomers. The two aren't close substitutes for each other. Among immigrant Mexican and Central American workers in 2004, only 7 percent had a college degree and nearly 60 percent lacked a high school diploma, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Among native-born U.S. workers, 32 percent had a college degree and only 6 percent did not have a high school diploma. Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits.

Moreover, Samuelson notes that many moderate liberals and middle-class voters almost reflexively support the Bush plan, even though it's obviously poisonous to their interests:

Business organizations understandably support guest worker programs. They like cheap labor and ignore the social consequences. What's more perplexing is why liberals, staunch opponents of poverty and inequality, support a program that worsens poverty and inequality. Poor immigrant workers hurt the wages of unskilled Americans. The only question is how much. Studies suggest a range "from negligible to an earnings reduction of almost 10 percent," according to the CBO.

It's time, indeed, for progressives to come up with their own plan for dealing with immigration -- one that goes beyond the scapegoating and the narrow business interests and realistically and fairly comes to grips with the issue.

The negative effects of unbridled immigration on American workers is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how liberals should be thinking about this. They need to understand that mass employment of illegal immigrants is open ground for gross exploitation and civil-rights abuses. It also corrodes the value of citizenship. As Samuelson has noted elsewhere, the current wave "is increasingly sabotaging the assimilation process."

As Bill Sher at Liberal Oasis explained awhile back, it's not only possible, but imperative, that liberals develop a plan of immigration reform that embraces their values and effectively resolves the problems.

The answer, it must be noted, is not to be found in the reforms currently favored by many moderate Democrats embodied in the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, which essentially just extends the current flaws in policy. As Paul Donnelly explained in one of my threads here awhile back (from this post):

[I]t essentially accelerates the core problem of the current mess to escape velocity. We're now trying to manage immigration by backlog, and when that gets to be too much, we make more exceptions (like 245(i), or amnesty) instead of new rules that will work. The McCain-Kennedy proposal is for 400,000 "temporary" visas a year, plus dependents that brings the total up to about a million annually), ALL of whom will eventually be eligible for green cards -- except, you see, there ain't but 87,000 green cards a year available in these employment-based slots, which McCain-Kennedy doesn't even attempt to address.

So, if we're going to discard the traditional, interest-driven approach, where do we begin?

Getting a clear view of the big picture with immigration is essential. As with many previous waves of immigration, there is a strong "push-pull" dynamic at work in our relationship with Mexico: there are conditions there pushing them over our borders, combined with a strong demand pulling them here.

The latter is most obvious to us here. The big gorilla on our side of the fence is American business' demand for cheap labor, which creates the opportunities many immigrants seek:

"There is a demand for cheap labor and since immigrants have a need to survive, they are willing to provide that supply of labor. It is a complicated topic, but we will not reduce the amount of undocumented immigration without eliminating the demand (for) cheap labor," Rodriguez said.

The most significant contributors to this demand are:

-- Agribusiness, which has been the chief exploiter of immigrant labor for decades, but whose use of undocumented workers has exploded since American farming has become vertically and horizontally integrated under the Big Five food corporations.

-- The construction industry, which makes billions of dollars annually on the backs of illegal workers, and simultaneously exposes them to an array of abuses.

-- Wal-Mart, whose employment practices involving undocumented workers are nearly as abusive as those of the day-labor market, all driven by the demand for those low, low prices.

It doesn't help, of course, that Democrats are as often fully in bed with these corporate interests as Republicans are. Severing that relationship -- or at least permanently altering it -- is going to be essential to any kind of effective reforms that progressives might concoct.

But we're also going to have to come to terms with the "push" from the Mexican side of the border. At some point, we're going to have to begin behaving more like real neighbors when it comes to our neighbors to the south, instead of treating them like the second-class humans as so many Americans are wont to do. Certain imbedded American attitudes -- particularly the notion that poor people are poor because they're lazy and won't work hard enough -- linger in our economic policies and our cultural prejudices. The result is that we come to think of the pervasive poverty of so many Mexicans' daily lives as almost "natural" instead of the atrocity it is.

Marcela Sanchez at the Washington Post went into this in some detail awhile back:

This truth is so obvious it seems a cliche and yet it remains mostly absent from the current debate on how to reform U.S. immigration. For all the talk around the country of border enforcement, guest worker programs, employer sanctions and driver's licensing restrictions, the sad fact is that none of these "solutions'' addresses the root of the problem -- a persistent and large U.S.-Mexican income disparity.

Even the most comprehensive and progressive immigration reform proposal in years, introduced this month by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., is more concerned with making U.S. immigration policy more humane than dealing with income disparity between the United States and Mexico. The bill crafts a guest worker program -- creating new visa categories and quotas and a secure identification system for employers -- but only provides a vague indication that income disparity might be a problem worth taking on.

There have been some ideas put forth for tackling this disparity. Robert Pastor at Newsweek described one such potential solution, particularly in the wake of the economic disaster that NAFTA has proven to be for Mexican workers:

What they should do is think far more boldly. The only way to solve the most pressing problems in the region -- including immigration, security, and declining competitiveness -- is to create a true North American Community. No two nations are more important to the United States than Canada and Mexico, and no investment will bolster security and yield greater economic benefits for America than one that narrows the income gap between Mexico and its North American partners.

Bridging that gap was supposed to be one of the many benefits that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would deliver. And indeed, since NAFTA took effect in 1994, trade and investment among the United States, Mexico and Canada have nearly tripled, making North America the world's largest free-trade area in terms of territory and gross domestic product (GDP). Yet the income gap has widened: the annual per capita GDP of the United States ($43,883) today is more than six times that of Mexico ($6,937).

NAFTA has been inadequate in other ways as well. The agreement made no provisions for cushioning economic downturns like the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-95. It created no credible institutions that operate on a truly regional basis. Thus, after terrorists struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration unilaterally tightened security on its international borders while Ottawa and Mexico City reverted to their traditional ambivalence toward Washington.

Illegal immigration has increased and if anything, NAFTA has inadvertently fueled immigration by encouraging foreign investment near the U.S.-Mexican border, which in turn serves as a magnet for workers in central and southern Mexico. As a result, the number of undocumented Mexican workers who live in the United States has skyrocketed in the NAFTA era, from an estimated 1 million in the mid-1990s to about 6 million today. One of every six undocumented immigrants is under 18 years old, and since the mid-1990s the fastest growth of the population has occurred in states like Arizona and North Carolina that had relatively small numbers of foreign-born residents in the past.

An effective program of immigration reform will recognize this dynamic and -- in direct contradistinction with the Republican programs -- seek equitable solutions based on the principle that immigration is inseparable from citizenship, that the goal of immigration is to enhance the pool of citizens and make lives better both here and abroad; that a sound immigration policy will benefit people on both sides of the border.

I think Donnelly's outline of a reform program would be an excellent place to start. His thesis:

"Immigration policy fails because America promises more than it delivers. That blurs legal and illegal, permanent and temporary; outlawing marriages, exiling families and dragging down wages. But foreigners should be legal when they are wives, husbands, kids or employed siblings of legal permanent residents and even citizens: we promised. Failing to deliver makes enforcement nearly impossible, it erodes citizenship and inspires bad ideas like replacing the Ellis Island model with a German-style guest worker plan severing immigration from citizenship.

"So replace the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act with a point system that combines family and employment and other VALUES. Stop subsidizing employers, enough exceptions like amnesty: let's make rules that work. Aim immigration at citizenship by the accumulation of what we WANT in new Americans. Start with green cards for spouses of permanent residents just as for citizens, but recognize that sibling immigration is essentially a hiring network, and that when workers have "temporary" jobs for five years, they ARE permanent -- and ought to be on the path to citizenship. Accelerating Americanization is key."

To which I'll add:

-- Crack down on American corporate behavior -- both in its thirst for cheap labor, and in its constant export of American jobs. Corporations who hire mass numbers of undocumented workers should be held culpable for their lawbreaking and forced to pay fines they can't simply shrug off, as they do. And too many of those who export American jobs to places like Mexico often do so in a way that actually depresses wages in those countries; these kinds of predatory practices should be made illegal.

-- Build support for programs to ameliorate the wage disparity between the two nations: explore the possibility of a North American Community. Reform the provisions of NAFTA so that they help Mexican workers earn decent livings. Don't drive down the American standard of living. Rather, abide by the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats -- including those of our neighbors.

Progressives need to put together a program of immigration reforms now. It need not necessarily be these particular reforms, but we need to begin talking and thinking about it before the summer arrives so that, when elections come, everyone knows where Democrats stand on the issue.

Because if they can do that, those 500,000 people are just the beginning of the tide that will join them in that cause.