ISSUE OF IMMIGRATION COULD BE ANOTHER HORNETS NEST FOR REPUBLICAN PARTY

These days it seems like Roland's greatest joy is in his third grade students. He's so excited about how smart they are and how they seem to crave education and how well they respond to him. He teaches in one of the "worst" school districts in the U.S., one whose high school was just de-accredited. I'm not sure how many of his students were born in the U.S.-- not many-- but he did say that virtually none of the parents who showed up for parent-teacher night spoke English. But he was glowing about how the parents' positive and supportive attitudes towards education for their boys and girls.

So you'd never believe the kinds of arguments Roland and I get into over immigration. I'm not even sure what he really believes, but for the past dozen years, his views on immigration have fairly-well parroted those espoused by Limbaugh, O'Reilly and other right-wing propagandists trying to use their divisive lies to push the Republican corporate agenda. In short their argument goes like this: the Democrats (liberals, bleeding hearts...) want to let the country be over-run by "scary others." The irony of the right-wing argument is that it is always the establishment Republicans (the part of the party that serves the interests, embodies the interests, of big business and Corporatism) who are desperate for the kind of cheap labor that will hold down labor costs and erode the bargaining power of the dreaded labor unions. They can't have slavery but they always try to get as close to their favorite social institution as possible. Pushed by alarmed labor unions, Democrats tend to oppose this and make the case that if you let them in, you have to treat them humanely and the same as everyone else gets treated. The GOP strategists, not to mention arch-reactionary neanderthals like Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Lamar Smith (R-TX) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) have been able to use the issue for a racist, populist, divisive appeal.

Interestingly, a very under-reported story emerged from a fax sent to a wrong fax number. The fax came from the Capitol Hill office of lunatic fringe congressman Lamar Smith (who is on the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims as well as the Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Cybersecurity), meant for Bush's tubby Rasputin, Karl Rove. It was accidentally sent to a similar fax number belonging to a Democratic congressman. Smith's memo, addressed to "Hon. Karl Rove" (although where the honorific comes from for the unelected, treacherous and traitorous Rove is unclear, unless it is short for "honey), was in preparation for a meeting about how to twist and distort Democrats' positions on the issue. "Immigration needs to be considered in the context of: (1). Media Bias, (2). Animosity toward the president and (3) the feelings of the Republican base," Smith's memo states. He goes on to obliviously that "Liberals can easily and accurately be painted as opposing enforcement."

Ironically, Republican establishment politicians may have stirred up a real hornets nest. You have a drooling fascist like Tancredo threatening to run for president and showing the vicious, racist, ugly face of the GOP in his blatantly anti-Latino attacks. And in the race to replace Christopher Cox in an ultra-safe Republican congressional seat in Orange County, CA, you have the head of the Minutemen, a KKK-like anti-immigrant redneck organization, looking like he will throw the congressional election to a Democrat in what has become a 3-way race (with the establishment Republican representing greed and selfishness and the KKK guy representing hated and bigotry-- a rendering asunder of the basic GOP coalition).