Latino Blogger

Can you guess where Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) got the script for his press conference?

Nothing like Republican “family values”.

Gonzales resigns, the title says it all.

He was the biggest embarrassment to Hispanic Americans in the USA. Good riddance!

According to Rudy Giuliani, if he becomes president he will work to legalize the immigration status of all undocumented workers currently in the country.

In response to a question by Richard Pope, 75, about the 12 million illegal immigrants already here, Giuliani said, “I would say come forward, get your … tamper-proof ID card, get photographed and fingerprinted, and we will check you out.”

He added, “If you want to work, pay your fair share and we’ll sign you up. People who don’t sign up we will find and throw out of the country.”

Giuliani also said those workers who came here illegally but who qualified for the ID card could eventually become eligible for citizenship.

“If they ever wanted to become citizens, I would say they would have to pay a fine so it’s not amnesty,” Giuliani said. “Also they have to get at the back of the line, not get ahead of anybody else.”

Wow! This sounds as a pretty reasonable first step, although I would love to see the fine print.

Too bad there are a few small problems: his position is pretty much unacceptable to the rest of his party, you can never tell how long he will take to flip-flop, and unfortunately the remaining 90% of his program stinks. Otherwise, I think he is the perfect candidate.

A number of Latino organizations and others in Arizona have united to set up a network of hotlines for people to report bigots engaged in racial profiling.

This is in response to the much criticized Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s hotline, launched last month, that encourages people to report information on undocumented immigrants.

As if you could tell who is undocumented and who is not by simply looking at their faces. Oh! wait…… You actually can….! The undocumented ones must be the “browns”……at least in the minds of the bigots.

“We need this hotline taken down,” said Rep. Steve Gallardo, a Phoenix Democrat. “This hotline is solely set up for racial profiling. . . . We need Sheriff Joe Arpaio to do his job in enforcing the laws without using race as the sole purpose of trying to determine if someone is here illegally.”

Agreed!

These are not my words but a reflection of how the chairman of the Texas Republican National Hispanic Assembly feels about the GOP:

At a Mexican restaurant in the East End, Reggie Gonzales explains all the ways in which the Republican Party irks him these days: the “holier than thou” attitudes of some leaders, the second-class status he says it assigns to Hispanic members, and most of all, the harsh, xenophobic rhetoric frothing from the mouths of some party members discussing immigration.

It must be hard to associate yourself with people that don’t want you:

“People around here, they ask me all the time, ‘You’re an American of Mexican descent. Why do you deal with them fools?’ ” he says. Lately, he’s really beginning to wonder.

I have always asked myself the same question: Why do some Hispanics deal with them fools?

Fortunately, more and more Hispanics are discovering the truth

Yet, the 60-year-old [Gonzales] says he no longer feels welcome in a party that seems to view Hispanics as political currency, rather than equals worthy of leadership. “They only want the Mexican vote. They take us down from the shelf. They give us a bath, give us a suit and say ‘OK, you’re part of the party,’” Gonzales says. “As state chairman, I’m encouraging all of my county chairmen to vote independently, you know, vote their consciences. … I think, maybe if we start doing that, then maybe they’ll start noticing us. And if they don’t want to notice us, then maybe we’ll start our own party.”

No need to start your own party Reggie, you can be an Independent and find a home among progressive Hispanics, or perhaps even ease your way into a Democratic party that has much more in common with you than you have ever imagined.

As usual, E. J. Dionne has it right, this time on the reasons for the Democrats’ capitulation to Bush on warrantless surveillance.

“Even some very liberal Democrats worried about the political costs of blocking action (on the FISA bill) before the summer recess. That Saturday night, the House sent the president a bill that, as a disgusted Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) put it, with just a touch of exaggeration, ‘makes Alberto Gonzalez the sheriff, the judge and the jury.’ “

If this is how the Democrats plan to act to “preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States of America” we are all doomed.

“The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.”

Dionne also says that Pelosi received more than 200,000 e-mails of protest for letting the bill go forward.

“The entire display was disgraceful because an issue of such import should not be debated in a political pressure cooker. It’s not even clear that new legislation was required; Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), for one, believes many of the problems with handling interceptions involving foreign nationals are administrative in nature and that beefing up and reorganizing the staff around the FISA court might solve the outstanding problems.

But if legislation was needed, there were many ways to grant necessary authority while preserving real oversight. The Democrats got trapped, and they punted. The Republicans have never met a national security issue they’re not willing to politicize. This is no way to run a superpower.”

I guess this is solid evidence supporting the fact that bloggers and the American people are actually in strong agreement despite what Washington pundits and Faux News would like us to believe.

According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center

“More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don’t care about the people they report.”

And for those of us who use the Internet as our main source of news here is something we already knew or strongly suspected:

“More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.”

And even more interestingly

“More than half — 53 percent — of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for “failing to stand up for America”.”

This is more evidence of the abysmal disconnect that exists between the tradiitonal media and mainstream America.

Thanks to Congress.

Here is Colbert’s perspective:

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