Category: Politics

Who Created the Anti-Immigrant Bill in AZ?

Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in and added much more information to the puzzle of the new Arizona immigration law and I’m going to reprint a lot of it further below to back up my previous post on this subject.  In a forum the other day after my first post many argued that Kobach really didn’t help craft the bill — but now the evidence that he did is crystal clear.

I think the people trying to distance Kobach are vested in denying the connection due to his long association with a known and designated hate group (F.A.I.R.) Kobach also has associations with the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank that has sired other lobbyists and political operatives who skate the very thinnest borderlines of acceptability.

Kobach has spoken the past four years to any wingnut who will listen to stir the anti immigrant furor, from populist Lou Dobbs to Phylis Schafly’s far right religious fundamentalist group, Eagle Forum, and the list even includes Faux libertarians who operate in a wasteland of cognitive dissonance from actual liberty.. you know like freedom from invasive carrying of papers….  He’s a single issue operative who is trying to parlay fear of immigrants into a lucrative career. So far it seems to be working, as you can see from the article he’s no stranger to crafting legislation for the Tanton Nativist crowd.

He’s drafted other pieces of anti-immigrant legislation that have ended up in courts and cost the governments who were fooled a pretty penny in fees etc. (I’ll wager a nickle that Kris gets called in these cases as an “expert witness” although I don’t know that for certain.) The people of Arizona need to take their legislators to task for being such tools for a hate lobby since this is going to go down in the courts and cost Arizona some money when it’s all said and done. Kris Kobach’s Konstruction really hinges on the vagueness of a new concept of “lawful contact”  and how far zealots can stretch it. If you search google you can see that everyone is wondering what the hell the bill means by “Lawful Contact.”

Can the city librarian ask you for your papers? Your child’s principle? Both come into “lawful contact” with citizens of the US all day every day, and both are “City officials”. See how vague this is? It’s billed as “anti-immigrant” but it’s really anti-Freedom, anti-liberty, and it’s really crazy that purported Libertarians are supporting this.

UPDATE: Much more on FAIR at LGF

With all of that said here’s the meat from the SPLC Hatewatch article:

Kris Kobach, the author of the Arizona law and a lawyer at FAIR’s Immigration Reform Law Institute, has been the prime mover behind numerous ordinances that seek to punish those who aid and abet “illegal aliens,” including laws adopted in Farmer’s Branch, Texas, and Hazelton, Pa.

The laws have not done well and have cost some localities immense sums of money to defend. Recently, the city of Albertville, Ala., refused to work with Kobach on just such an ordinance, reportedly because of the high legal costs incurred by these other communities.

Before joining FAIR, Kobach served as U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s top immigration adviser. He then moved on to take charge of Department of Justice efforts to tighten border security after the 9/11 attacks. There, he developed a program — the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System — that called for close monitoring of men from Arab and Muslim nations, even legal U.S. residents. The program collapsed due to complaints of racial profiling and discrimination.

Given Kobach’s history with racial profiling, it is particularly alarming that he was tapped by Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio in February to train his officers. A federal grand jury investigation is under way amid a slew of complaints that Arpaio used racial profiling techniques to round up suspected undocumented immigrants. The grand jury is also reportedly looking at whether Arpaio used his office to target political opponents.

FAIR’s poison is now spreading. Legislation similar to Arizona’s has been introduced in Texas, and six other states are considering doing so.

It’s not surprising to find a group like FAIR behind this repugnant law. FAIR has an extensive track record of racism and bigotry. The group, for example, has accepted $1.2 million from the racist Pioneer Fund, a foundation established to promote the genes of white colonials and fund studies of race, intelligence and genetics. FAIR has employed key staffers who have also joined white supremacist groups; it has board members who write regularly for hate publications; it promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latino immigrants; and it has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.

FAIR has been dominated for much of its life by its racist founder and current board member, John Tanton, who has written that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” Tanton’s role model for FAIR is John Trevor Sr., founder of the racist American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and a key architect of the racially restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Trevor also distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America. Tanton once said Trevor should serve as FAIR’s “guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”

FAIR’s president, Dan Stein, has warned that immigrants are engaged in “competitive breeding” aimed at diminishing white power. He led efforts to win funding from the Pioneer Fund, saying in 1993 that his “job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer’s money.” Stein also served as editorial adviser to Tanton’s hate journal, The Social Contract, at a time when it ran its ugliest edition ever, “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.” The issue’s lead article argued that multiculturalism was replacing “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.” Stein has declined to offer any criticism of FAIR’s founder, instead characterizing Tanton last September as a “Renaissance man.”

The principal sponsor of the Arizona law, state Sen. Russell Pearce, has his own history of hate. In 2006, Pearce forwarded an email to his supporters from the neo-Nazi National Alliance titled “Who Rules America?” The article criticized the media for promoting multiculturalism and racial equality, and for presenting the Holocaust as fact. More recently, Pearce has been photographed hugging J.T. Ready, a Phoenix-area resident who is a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.

AZ Immigration Bill: Kobach’s and Pearce’s Roots in White Supremacy

I’ve experience with seeing Kobach speak myself – with coded anti-immigration nativist dog whistling in many speeches; and his crowing over creating this legislation and association with FAIR speaks for itself.

Rachel is not making this up, I’ve researched these groups and this background myself. If you need confirmation on Russell’s nativist and White Supremacist ties, you can reference the long history at The Feathered Bastard. (While Lemmons is definitely partisan and goes over the top sometimes, he is factually correct in the background to the articles and that’s really what matters.)

I’ve experience with seeing Kris Kobach speak myself – with coded anti-immigration nativist dog whistling in many speeches and his birtherism he’s not a mainstream Republican, he’s also fixated on Acorn and whatever the conspiracy outrage of the day is on the right; and his crowing over creating this legislation and association with FAIR speaks for itself. Kobach also seems to be one of Fox New’s “go to guys” anytime the issue of immigration comes up, and he’s worked to promote the Nativist cause for Arpaio, and in Nebraska.  This all boils down to the fact that Kobach is really a single issue candidate for an insidious lobby with roots in eugenicist movements, he’s not running for Kansans, he’s running for Nativists.

Of course, Kobach is listed as an attorney with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR, as its “national expert on constitutional law.” Aside from doing legal work for FAIR, when Kobach was running for Congress in Kansas’ 3rd District in 2003 and 2004, he took $10,000 from a FAIR-related political action committee, the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC, formerly FAIR PAC.

The president of the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC is Mary Lou Tanton, wife of John Tanton, the founder of FAIR. Tanton still sits on FAIR’s board of directors.

FAIR is a pretty nasty anti-immigrant enterprise, having taken $1.2 million in the past from the eugenics-loving Pioneer Fund, a group founded on the idea of scientific racism.

I’m still registered R for now, and I will be voting against the wingnuts like Kobach in the primaries. If the wingnuts win, I will switch parties.

UPDATE: As can be seen here, Kris Kobach has a vested interest in this bill.

On Heading Off to Hate Church

from the Churches that pray for our President’s death to those that hate Islam and want to hurry a Civilizational apocalyptic war with all of Islam, to those that hate gays, to those fed by foreign lobbies with arcane goals, these hate churches are on the rise.

It’s not a secret that hate churches are on the rise in the US, the prototypical one being the Phelps clan; Westboro Baptist tends to castigate Homosexuals and other religions, such as Judaism.

The Phelps hate church is really just the tip of the iceberg however, and a convenient focus for media and others who would define hate churches – those who would point at the Westboro Baptist Church and say “See? We’re not as bad as them…”

However the reality belies that argument — from the Churches that pray for our President’s death to those that hate Islam and want to hurry a Civilizational apocalyptic war with all of Islam, to those that hate gays, to those fed by foreign lobbies with arcane goals, these hate churches are on the rise.

The two themes you find constant among these groups are hate for other religions (Judaism, Islam, etc.) and hate for Gays. Occasionally you will find racial prejudice fed as well, but that’s inconstant.

So why does religion sometimes foster hate? More importantly: why does a minority of church goers in the US pick a church that extolls hate? This is something I will be discussing and speculating upon over the next few weeks, since most people who are religious cannot begin to fathom where these fringers are coming from.

In the Baylor study, college students recruited from introductory psychology classes were primed with either religious-word letter strings like “Bible,” “faith,” “Christ” and “church” or neutral words like “shirt,” “butter,” “switch” and “hammer.” Researchers found that religiously primed students demonstrated “a slight but significant” increase in racial prejudice.

Previous studies show a complex relationship between religiosity and racial prejudice. Some dimensions of religion have been shown to increase levels of prejudice, while others reduce it. Those studies all rely on self-reporting, however, and are therefore skewed by the phenomenon of “social desirability,” meaning that some people report more positive racial attitudes than they actually hold.

The Baylor study is thought to be the first to test whether exposure to religious concepts may contribute to racial prejudice.

Remember When Republicans Were the Adults in the Political Debate?

I’m a life long Republican — I really wish I could counter any of Rachel’s points here with some hard hitting reality – but I can’t because what she is stating is true. That’s a sad statement about the creeps running the right at present.

The Mainstreaming of Extremism on the Right

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok details the rise in militia, patriot, and extremist groups last year. The factor that he misses in this video however is not the rise of these groups, but rather their wider acceptance. Mainstream center right and even right-right politicians of years past would never have spoken at a convention co-sponsored by groups like the Oathkeepers and John Birch Society as this year’s CPAC event was.

There’s also no doubt that some of the leadership of the Republican Party is definitely pandering to these paranoid fools.

These radical right nutballs and dirtbags have always been out there, and Mark even mentions some of the outcomes of the past paranoia uprisings in the video, but they’ve never been accepted by the mainstream right like they have this past year. It’s highly disturbing  that fear, paranoia, and angst have replaced leadership, direction, and principle on the right. It’s why I refuse to call myelf a conservative anymore because if Oathkeepers, the John Birch Society and what I saw at CPAC this year are what it means to be conservative, then  I don’t want any part of it.

References for those who might not understand some of the Kookspiracy theories and groups mentioned in the video

New World Order Conspiracy Theory

The Turner Diaries (a book cited and read by many militia leaders and supremacist terrorists like Tim McVeigh)

You should also note that the 9/11 truthers are right in step with this kookspiracy surge, and that there are many crossovers such as Phillip Berg and others.

Lastly, here’s an example of one of the leech pundits, (also a truther) who makes his living feeding this paranoia. Lately you’ve seen him linked by mainstream right news sites like Drudge. His predecessor in the survivalist ’80’s was Howard Ruff — indeed you have to wonder why some of the new paranoia pundits haven’t been sued for plagiarism by the old school doom-criers, since most of the new doomsters are merely retreading old trash.

Bottom line: You have a lot more to worry about from Right wing Whackos like Oath Keepers or this “Operation Exodus” guy forming a police state or militia in your area than you do from President Obama and Fema camps. If the idea of un-elected and unappointed senile old farts with fifty cals thinking they are the law doesn’t bother you then I don’t know what will.

What we Know About Climate Change

A new video from Peter Sinclair who outlines some of the very basic and elementary facts and proofs of man made global warming, and how they are supported.

I’ve known about man made global warming since the 1980’s, when I used to point it out as a good reason for increasing production of nuclear energy to the biomass and other alternative energy proponents in alt.sci.energy while arguing pro nuclear energy. It wasn’t a very convincing argument back then, and even while making it I thought we had a couple of centuries to get there. I would argue by saying that nuclear was inevitable because in a couple of centuries it was the only reasonable source and we would have to use it eventually anyway — why not start now? Not many bought it.

They weren’t buying it back then since at that point the left was highly populist and anti science. They would chant things like “Split wood, not Atoms!” and “The only physics I know is Ex-Lax” at university speeches when real scientists would try to point out that nuclear energy production wasn’t as dangerous as it was portrayed to be in “The China Syndrome”.  That was a loosing battle back then when I watched Amory Lovins and crew shut down Rancho Seco as a large wave of anti-science and unreason swept over the left.

Democrat Bill Proxmire was attacking NASA and other science institutions at every opportunity, new wave cults were taking over the left, and even some secular humanists whom I highly respected were falling sway to anti-science forces for politically expedient reasons around nuclear non proliferation. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov were not as supportive of increased nuclear energy production as they could have been, and joined with the left on that due to Reagan’s missile defense program among other things. Those were depressing times.

So here we are – thirty years later. We got the worst of outcomes from the left going populist and the right giving up for fiscal reasons – it was cheaper to burn coal. Meanwhile the Nuclear proliferation Djinn was out of the bottle even back then – Pakistan and India now have nuclear weapons, as does North Korea. Iran is on fast pace to get them as well. We also use more of the dirtiest source of power, coal, than ever before.

Politically the forces of populism that created this worst of both worlds scenario have flipped topsy-turvy – the left got a new generation of pro-science rebels and in the face of reality even old guard environmentalists like Patrick Moore who founded Greenpeace, and Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame have converted to pro nuclear energy. Some defense oriented Democrats are even beginning to see sense in missile defenses shared with our allies and have put aside knee-jerk complaining about missile defense.

On the right, religious fundamentalists now rule the Republican roost and  anti-science populism has now infested my party. So here comes my mea culpa — for political expediency and because I don’t agree with the approach of cap and trade, because I thought we had much more time, I’ve spoken out against the Anti-AGW movement.

My best attempt at convincing myself and others was back here, and as you can see from the strikeouts, and the other arguments since deflated many times, I didn’t do too great a job. You can even see me repeating denialist talking points in the comments, even though I was really trying to cut down on alarmism. Again, this was wrong.

If there were an article I could retract from my blog that would be the one. I can’t with any integrity just pull it however, I like truth best – so there it is, my guilty moment. Where I didn’t speak whole truths, where I omitted the fact that AGW is very real and measurable right now. It’s made me unhappy for a long time that I would subsume science to politics so easily, so consider this my confession and my attempt to make it right.

My stance on the  issue still hasn’t changed much mind you – I think that the answer lies in high energy environmentalism. If we are to live on a clean planet then cheap and clean energy is the only reasonable means I see to getting there. I can’t support starving people to fight AGW, but I recognize we have to do something and quickly. We can’t wait another century as I had thought — we must start now.

True Fiscal Conservatives Always Charge Their Groceries to State Party Credit Cards…

In the mounting brouhaha over Marco Rubio’s personal expenses being charged to GOP credit cards Hot air has been fast to leap to the defense; after all the darling of the CPAC convention is a true fiscal conservative in the “Duke” Randall Cunningham and J.D. Hayworth mold…

See TNR for more:

Florida Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio charged grocery bills, car repairs and a number of other personal expenses to a GOP-issued credit card during his tenure as speaker of the state’s House, according to a report in the Miami Herald.

The take on this from Charles Crist, Rubio’s opponent here

Florida Dems call for an Independent prosecutor and corruption probe after Sansom resignation.

It appears Rubio double billed the state for some flights as well.

Rubio: It might have been my staffers…. there’s some of that personal responsibility that “True Conservatives” are always harping about…

Rubio’s barber less expensive than Edwards — the definition of fiscal conservatism

Kudos to Mark Levin and Bill Bennett

Kudos are due Mark Levin for calling out the Bircher Co-Sponsorship at CPAC, and refusing to speak there because of it. Mark and I probably don’t see eye to eye on some things (Discovery Institute issues likely) but you have to point out when someone’s doing something right.

Of course we also have to point out when Huckabee and Palin are right in the same way…