Something to keep an eye on...

@senjohnmccain again feels compelled to remind Sun Lakes crowd "we can't send them all back." #immigration
— BrahmResnik (@brahmresnik) February 19, 2013

TPM has more on the story, but if you're a Republican, you are sweating bullets right now.

Think about it.  If you are a GOP Pol, you know your future, in fact the entire future of the party comes down to how well you behave on Immigration reform.  With more and more Latinos coming of age, and more and more of your own base dying off, the trend appears that starting with the 2016 Presidential Election, the old Republican Party will not see power for a generation.

Yeah, that bad.

The solution is simple, come up with a massive Immigration Reform plan.  Behave well.  Show the Latino/Hispanic population of this country that you don't hate them.  And for a majority of the GOP Caucus in the House and Senate, that's absolutely true.  They don't hate Latinos/Hispanics.

Problem is, the base of the Party does.  They genuinely hate Latinos and Hispanics, and want to see the lot of them,  legal or no, bounced from the country.  Heck, they probably want to see speaking Spanish turned into some kind of felony.

This Town Hall was on a border state, which has been reliably Republican.  It has a massively unpopular (and massively unconstitutional) Immigration Bill that's unpopular everywhere...except among the people of that Town Hall.

The people of Arizona, moreso the Republicans of Arizona know that they're staring into the eyes of death (of their party).  They know that young Latinos will not rest until the white, racist, anti-Immigrant GOP is burned to the ground, and yet this is how they react??

I want to see how McCain reacts when he gets back to town, but in my mind, knowing how ultimately spineless McCain is, the odds of us getting comprehensive Immigration reform this year or any time before 2014 just took a hit.

Bad news for our friends and neighbors, but very good news if you're a Democrat.  The Republicans are going to destroy themselves and hand you power as they do it.

Poll: Latinos Prefer Obama By 39-Point Margin

I'm sure in Republicanland, this Poll is excellent news...for Mitt Romney.

A poll released on Monday from Latino Decisions shows that Latinos registered voters prefer President Barack Obama to presumtpive Republican nominee Mitt Romney 65 percent to 26 percent. The results are in line with previous polls showing Obama ahead amongst the key demographic -- the PollTracker Average shows the President ahead of Romney by a 29.2 percent margin overall.

The poll also showed that 56 percent of Latinos also believe the GOP is ignoring their concerns, while 21 percent added that they believe the Republican Party is 'hostile' to Latinos.

Of course, this poll won't mean anything if Latinos don't show their strength at the polls this November.

Is the GOP about to spend the next couple of Election Cycles in the wilderness?

Possibly.

Let's start off with Andrew Sullivan:

After Obama's end-run around Romney on deferring deportations of young native-born Americans who have broken no law apart from being born, the Latina Oprah, Cristina Saralegui, puts her invaluable imprimatur on the president. It's getting more and more necessary for Mitt to max out his percentage of the Caucasian vote:

Most polls this spring show Obama running near the 52 percent he won among those upscale white women in 2008, and also remaining very close to his 80 percent showing among all minorities. If Obama can hold that level of support from those two groups, Romney could amass a national majority only by winning nearly two-thirds of all other whites—the men with college degrees, and the men and women without them. To put that challenge in perspective, Reagan, while winning his historic landslide, carried a combined 66.5 percent of those three groups. To defeat Obama, in other words, Romney may need to equal Reagan.

So, Romney may be forced to turn to White voters in an unprecedented fashion (i.e., run a more racist-slash-racial campaign than he's used to) in order to compete. Yet, if the Senate, specifically the Republican Senate hadn't bowed down and caved to George W. Bush 43 at every possible turn:

“The importance of the Hispanic vote to President Barack Obama’s reelection chances is practically impossible to overstate,” writes Frank Wilkinson over at Bloomberg View. He’s almost certainly right.

So here’s my question: If President George W. Bush, working with Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, had passed comprehensive immigration reform in 2005, would Democrats have a chance this year? I see how they could have won in 2008, amidst a financial crisis and Bush fatigue. But it’s harder to see how they’d win in 2012 if the Hispanic vote was split.

Hey, Alabama! Stephen Colbert TOLD YOU SO (about your B.S. Immigration Law)!!!

The Colbert Report
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And yes, here's Colbert's complete actual Testimony in front of Congress:

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Why Sen. Marco Rubio is finished (as a potential Vice Presidential Candidate)

Remember, Marco Rubio did not lie. He took advantage of a lie to promote his Political biography. And when caught, he has waffled between doubling-down on the lie he took advantage of, and well...waffling even more.

As Chris Matthews explains in the clip below, in Politics you are either attacking or explaining.

Rubio is now into week two of explaining.


This here's coming out an inch at a time...and there's at least a few more feet to go.

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From the St. Petersburg Times:

On May 18, 1956, Mario and Oriales Rubio walked into the American Consulate in Havana and applied for immigrant visas. The form asked how long they intended to stay in the United States.

"Permanently," Mr. Rubio answered.

Nine days later, the couple boarded a National Airlines flight to Miami, where a relative awaited.

So began a journey that seems as ordinary as any immigrant story, but decades later served as the foundation of an extraordinary and moving narrative told repeatedly by their third child as he became one of the most powerful politicians in Florida and then a national figure.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has come under fire for incorrectly linking his parents to the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro beginning in 1959. He insists they are exiles nonetheless and angrily denounced the suggestion he misled for political gain.

"My upbringing taught me that America was special and different from the rest of the world, and also a real sense that you can lose your country," Rubio said in an interview this week.

But the visa documents cast clearer divisions between his parents, who came for economic reasons, and the Cubans who scrambled to leave their homeland but thought they could soon return. And the documents come to light amid new discrepancies since Rubio's time line came under scrutiny last week.

From Politico (and mind you, these are the stories from today):

In Miami’s Little Havana, the Cuban exile community has rallied to the defense of its favorite son, Sen. Marco Rubio, as he fights off allegations he embellished his family history to boost his meteoric political career.

But well beyond Calle Ocho, the freshman Florida Republican still faces a bigger challenge selling himself to the broader Hispanic electorate. Rubio is expected to encounter tough questions from voters and activists over his hard-line stance on immigration as he heads to Texas and possibly Arizona next week to court Hispanic voters and high-dollar donors. As his personal history morphs into a national political story, it’s clear Rubio still has plenty of skeptics in the Latino political community.

“He is a laughing stock in the Southwest … because people discovered he wasn’t telling the truth about his political Cuban exile history,” said DeeDee Garcia Blase, founder of Somos Republicans, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GOP group that backs a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “They are saying, at the end of the day, ‘He is just like us. His mom and dad came here; they migrated because of economic reasons, just like the rest of us.’”

The controversy about when — and under what circumstances — his family arrived in the U.S. has proved to be the first major test for the rising GOP star as he transitions from Sunshine State politics to the national stage, where the exile experience that he’s embraced doesn’t resonate among non-Cuban Hispanics as much as it does in the quaint cafes and bustling streets of Little Havana.

That cultural divide between his home crowd and the larger Latino electorate could pose a problem for Republicans who have billed Rubio, a favorite for the vice presidential spot in 2012, as their party’s great Hispanic hope.

And the Washington Post:

Republicans who are eager to repair the party’s battered image among Hispanic voters and unseat President Obama next year have long promoted a single-barrel solution to their two-pronged problem: putting Sen. Marco Rubio on the national ticket.

The charismatic Cuban American lawmaker from Florida, the theory goes, could prompt Hispanics to consider supporting the GOP ticket — even after a primary contest in which dust-ups over illegal immigration have left some conservative Hispanics uneasy.

But Rubio’s role in recent controversies, including a dispute with the country’s biggest Spanish-language television network and new revelations that he had mischaracterized his family’s immigrant story, shows that any GOP bet on his national appeal could be risky.

Democrats had already questioned whether a Cuban American who has voiced conservative views on immigration and opposed the historic Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, could appeal to a national Hispanic electorate of which Cubans are just a tiny fraction but have special immigration status. And Rubio’s support in Florida among non-Cuban Hispanics has been far less pronounced than among his fellow Cubans.

That ethnic calculus was further complicated by records, reported by The Washington Post last week, showing that Rubio had incorrectly portrayed his parents as exiles who fled Cuba after the rise of Fidel Castro. In fact, their experience more closely resembles that of millions of non-Cuban immigrants: They entered the United States 2 1 / 2 years before Castro’s ascent for apparent economic reasons.

Rubio made the exile story a central theme of his political biography, telling one audience during his Senate campaign, “Nothing against immigrants, but my parents are exiles.” A video, apparently produced for the conservative site RedState.com, shows black-and-white footage of Castro as Rubio speaks.

Even after the new reports of his parents’ entry, Rubio has said he remains the “son of exiles,” saying his parents had hoped to return to the island but did not because of the rise of a Communist state.

But in elevating exile roots over the apparent reality of his parents’ more conventional exodus, Rubio risks setting up a tension point with the country’s Hispanic voters — most of whom are Mexican American and have immigrant friends or ancestors who did not have access to the virtually instant legal status now granted to Cubans who make it into the United States.

“If he does take that mantle, there’ll be a lot of clarification that he’ll have to make on a whole lot of issues,” said Lionel Sosa, a longtime GOP strategist.

TPMDC: Democrats To Thrust Immigration Back Into Spotlight

Remember when I asked how did Josh miss the President's speech, on his pledge to pass the DREAM Act?

Yeah, I didn't think you would. That's okay, I don't mind.


Well, it looks like Josh (or should I say Christina Bellantoni) didn't miss it. A day late, sure, but...

"If people want to play politics, I think we ought to call the question. Are they for solutions or not?"

Making up for lost time today.

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Thought it was also important to put up Keith's interview with Clarissa Martinez, the Director of Immigration and National Campaigns for La Raza, to explain just what could be at stake for Latino in the November elections, because suddenly, it's a lot.

Long story short, Latinos have a loooong memory.

President Obama: Once again, in case you forgot "There is no us and them. In this country, there is only us.”

This is what I get for going to an all-day meeting, and not blogging: the President on offense.

This has been a good night.

The Small Business bill finally passed (more on that later). And, the President has decided to go for Middle Class Tax cuts, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and apparently Immigration reform in the form of the DREAM Act.



From the prepared remarks:

Now, I know that many of you campaigned hard for me, and understandably you’re frustrated that we have not been able to move this over the finish line yet. I am too. But let me be clear: I will not walk away from this fight. My commitment is getting this done as soon as we can. We can’t keep kicking this challenge down the road.

There’s no doubt the debate over how to fix all this has been a fractured and sometimes painful one in this country. And let’s face it, there are some who seek political advantage in distorting the facts and in dividing our people. We’ve seen it before. Some take advantage of the economic anxiety that people are feeling to stoke fear of those who look or think or worship differently -- to inflame passions between “us” and “them.”

I have news for those people: It won’t work. There is no “us” and “them.” In this country, there is only “us.” There is no Latino America or black America or white America or Asian America. There is only the United States of America -- all of us. All of us joined together. Indivisible.

By the way, if we are going for Obama Middle Class Tax Cuts, apparently I owe Nancy Pelosi an apology.

Nancy, I apologize. You go, Madame Speaker!

Though 31 Democrats (Democrats!) are clamoring for her to include tax cuts for the rich in these tax cuts. From what I can tell, she's telling those 31 to stick it, in the form of a separate vote.

That's right. Harry Reid sometime last week mentioned the possibility of there being a separate vote on the Tax Cuts for the Wealthy.

And remember something else, no matter what anyone is telling you, in this plan everyone gets a tax cut, not just the 98% that constitute me and you, but everyone...including the top 2%.

The trick is the top 2% will get a tax cut for the first $250,000 dollars of their income. The Republicans want them to get even more on top of that.

But the real story of the night is the Immigration Story. (Hell, the speech was last night. How did Josh miss this?!?)

And now, we turn to another frequent Obama critic, Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.). Needless to say, Rep. Gutierrez is happy tonight.

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President Obama's interview with Marv Alpert (VIDEO)

Worry not. I'm still trolling for the complete Oil Spill Press Conference Video. (I can't believe it was this early...at least for those of us on the Left Coast.)

In the meantime, Obama on the NBA, Lebron and the ability to take a hard foul with the Secret Service around...




By the way, he didn't completely advocate for LeBron going to the Bulls, as some have suggested. It was Marv who was advocating the President to advocate for Chicago. He said if LeBron finds a coach he respects, and a stable situation in Cleveland (I'm hoping that the Cavs get Byron Scott), he should stay in Cleveland.

Bad Boys, whatchu gonna do? (VIDEO)

Not sure if "Machete" is going to help... (VIDEO)

Yes, this a trailer for an actual movie. This isn't Funny or Die stuff, this is coming out September 3rd, 2010. (Can't say much for its box office prospects).



Let's be honest, the trailer was cut to respond to/take advantage of the Arizona Law. As quick as Rodriguez works, this had to have been in the works for the last year at least. (I've been hearing about a Machete movie since the first Spy Kids movie came out, so...)

This is Duncan Hunter's Brother?!? (VIDEO)

Okay, basic story: there's a canal separating the U.S. and Mexico near San Diego. It 's also the most dangerous body of water in the U.S. as crossing it has cost 550 people, mostly illegal immigrants, their lives.

And...there is a avid right-winger out there, working overtime, risking arrest, to put in some semblance of safety features across this canal, to allow the illegals to at least arrive alive...

...and this right winger is Duncan Hunter's brother???

Great Gosh a'mighty...


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What scares me about Arizona...

...is apparently what scares Ta-Neishi Coates of the Atlantic Monthly as well.

Carrying an illegal gun in New York is a crime, and it was a crime before New York City began searching people, stopped for another infraction, for illegal guns. Likewise, being an illegal alien was also, necessarily, a crime before Arizona's law. Both laws also place a burden of search on people who may well be innocent.

But whereas New York proving your innocence in New York means simply not having an illegal gun on your person, proving your innocence in Arizona means carrying around identification that you aren't an illegal alien. The right comparison isn't New York requiring you to submit to a search for illegal guns--it's New York requiring you to carry proof that you don't own an illegal gun.

Put differently, it was always a crime to carry an illegal gun in New York, but it was not always a (state) crime in Arizona for legal immigrants to leave their proof of residency at home. Now it is. Moreover, from what I can tell, this actually understates the law. Essentially, Arizona has made it a crime for anyone in the state to not have proof of citizenship on them at all times. Defenders of the law will say that police still have to stop you for something, and they still have to "suspect" that you did something.

Forgive, but I don't find that comforting. Amadou Diallo is dead because the police "suspected" he was drawing a gun. Oscar Grant is dead because the police "suspected" he needed to be tased. My old friend, Prince Jones, Howard University student and father of a baby girl, was murdered by the police in front of his daughter's home because police "suspected" he was a drug-dealer. (The cop was not kicked off the force.) Only a year ago, I was stopped in Chelsea, coming from an interview with NPR, because police "suspected" I was the Latino male who'd recently robbed someone.

This comes down to police power, and how comfortable you are with its extension. George Will, in a bit of populist demagoguery, implies that the critics of the Arizona law are people who only know illegal immigrants as cheap labor. But I suspect Will mostly has the exact same relationship with illegal immigrants. Moreover, I suspect that he only knows the police as the kind of Officer Friendlies who only arrest "the bad people."

I don't want to be cheap here, but it needs to said that when you actually know decent people who are dead because of our insane drug war, your perspective on police power changes. This is a multi-million dollar lawsuit waiting to happen. Someone is going to get killed. And the fact that "the vast majority of police are awesome" will not bring them back.

As Always...

Richard Cohen, as ever...with his head stuck up his @#$...

"By the time I get to Arizona..." (VIDEO)

No, the President did not quote Public Enemy during his speech today.

This is from a Naturalization Ceremony for American Soldiers on the White House lawn. It was a nice ceremony, but the President took a moment (about 16:00 minutes in) to blast Arizona and their (at the time) about-to-be-signed racist-ass law.



From the White House website:

...people who are in America illegally have a responsibility -- to pay their back taxes and admit responsibility for breaking the law, pay a penalty, learn English, pass criminal background checks, and get right with the law -- or face removal -- before they can get in line and eventually earn their citizenship.

So responsibility. Accountability. Common-sense, comprehensive immigration reform. I thank Secretary Napolitano for helping to lead our efforts, both on and off Capitol Hill. And I thank Senators Schumer and Graham for working with us to forge a bipartisan consensus on a framework for moving forward, and I welcome the commitment of House and Senate Democratic leaders to take action.

I’ll continue to consult with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and I would note that 11 current Republican Senators voted to pass immigration reform four years ago. I’m hopeful that they will join with Democrats in doing so again so we can make the progress the American people deserve.

Indeed, our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others. And that includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.

In fact, I’ve instructed members of my administration to closely monitor the situation and examine the civil rights and other implications of this legislation. But if we continue to fail to act at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country.

As a nation, as a people, we can choose a different future -- a future that keeps faith with our history, with our heritage, and with the hope that America has always inspired in the hearts of people all over the world. For just as each of these 24 new citizens once cast their eyes upon our country from afar, so too, somewhere in the world today is a young boy or a young girl wondering if they, too, might someday share in America’s promise.

Rachel Maddow v. Pat Buchanan (VIDEO)

Heavy racism pushback day today. Reasonably proud of the MSM.

This is Rachel Maddow smacking back against Pat Buchanan about his rather overt racism in an appearance from last week.

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Here's Pat's original (and highly racist) interview-slash-rant.

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The GOP's Anxiety about a changing America...

It's been said many times, many ways over the last week, but I liked Slate.com's Dahlia Lithwick's own take on it:

This could have been different, I kept thinking all day. These hearings didn't have to go this way. The instant Sen. Jeff Sessions used his second round of questioning to go back to the well of the "Wise Latina" issue, probing yet again at Sonia Sotomayor's alleged bias and wise Latina prejudice, it was perfectly clear that Senate Republicans wanted this hearing to be all about race and that her single, mangled half-sentence was the linchpin of their strategy. There were lines of people waiting patiently to get into these hearings, even if just for a few moments, and what was striking about it is that so many of them were very young, so many were women, and so many were of different races and colors. America's future was waiting in line to get a glimpse of a hearing at which the woman who will become this country's first Hispanic justice was repeatedly called out as someone with a race problem.

I don't think this is all posturing. Listening to Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn speak, it's clear that their anxieties about a changing America are real. Still, by making the whole case against her with a long, loopy line between her "wise Latina" speech and her panel decision in the Ricci case, they chose to turn this historic hearing into a crabbed and bitter conversation about the impact of race on America.

She also took on the Democrats, cracking on them for not making more of the Roberts Court's tendency for Judicial Activism.

Jeff Sessions needs to do his homework (VIDEO)

Thus quoth the Josh:

Remember that scene in Annie Hall where the Alvy and Annie are waiting in line at the movie and Alvy is going nuts listening to the pontificating blowhard going on about Marshall McLuhan and then Alvy pulls McLuhan himself out from behind the movie poster to tell the guy he's an idiot. Not quite identical and Sotomayor could have driven the point a bit harder but Judge Sotomayor managed to pull off something like that.

But, wait. It got worse (for Racist Jeff Sessions).

Cedarbaum went outside, and gave an interview to the Washington Wire, where she apparently said (quoted here from the Murdoch Street Journal):

I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging. We’d both like to see more women on the courts.

Ooops.

Which led my least favorite Senator (from California) to say: