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By Gina Nahai $11.20
By Susan Jacoby $16.32
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Members of the San Diego-area Minutemen and other anti-immigration groups voiced their displeasure with Barack Obama’s stance on the issue outside the National Council of La Raza convention in San Diego on Sunday.
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 youtube.com
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Following an appearance by Barack Obama the day before, Sen. John McCain faced some tough questions about his stance on immigration Monday at a meeting with members of the National Council of La Raza in San Diego, where he denied Obama’s claim that he had changed his tune on the immigration issue to please his Republican base.
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 AP photo / LM Otero
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Along with maintaining the hypervigilance necessary to avoid having one’s gaffes caught on camera and replayed endlessly on YouTube, politicians face a vast array of image-maintenance challenges these days. John McCain encountered a PR problem of the lower-tech variety on Friday, in the form of two newspaper articles focusing on details from his private life that could be gleaned from plain ol’ public records.
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Here’s a story, both chilling and inspiring: how prisoners at an Oklahoma prison in the aftermath of the Depression led a struggle to limit the practice of compulsory sterilization.
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By Nicholas von Hoffman — A new book by New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse argues that the plight of American workers, both white-collar and blue-collar, is growing worse, putting the American dream out of the reach of tens of millions of citizens.
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 AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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By Bill Boyarsky — If Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, is to defeat John McCain, he’d better get started organizing teams of election law attorneys and other specialists to guard against efforts already underway to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
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Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University’s Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college’s decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.
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Eric Hobsbawm, one of our most celebrated historians, looks at what makes the American Colossus uniquely dangerous in its imperial overreach at the dawn of the third millennium.
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 criminal-justice-online.com
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If you thought reality TV was only for wannabe warblers, petulant teens and bug-eating fetishists, guess again. The Department of Homeland Security, “as well as several other government agencies,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, is working with ABC on a new “unscripted” show called “Border Security USA,” brought to you, creepily enough, by the executive producer of “Big Brother.”
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Whether it’s just window dressing or the opening salvo of a serious effort to court the Latino vote, John McCain has launched a Spanish-language Web site. While McCain was once a champion of immigration reform, he did a substantial bit of pandering during the Republicans-only leg of the campaign. In fact, he even said at one point that he wouldn’t vote for his own immigration bill.
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 DoD / Dan Heaton
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The Department of Homeland Security has received approval from Congress to ignore dozens of environmental laws in order to construct a 670-mile border fence. Environmentalists are worried about the impact the project could have on endangered species, and several property owners have attempted to obstruct the construction process.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — What’s the matter with conservatism? Its problems start with the failure of George W. Bush’s presidency but they don’t end there.
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By Joe Conason — The revival of John McCain’s presidential candidacy, now expected to carry him through to his party’s nomination, can be interpreted as either proof of the judgment of Republican primary voters or evidence of the paucity of alternative choices.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If the Arizona senator secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics—a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments.
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Four far-right European political parties have allied with each other, hoping to form a European Union umbrella party opposed to “Islamization” and immigration. Europeans, you see, will never give up their welfare states, so conservatives there spend much of their time bashing immigrants. Unlike America, where xenophobia is, though popular, something of a passing fancy.
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Despite his Southern accent and the conclusions of a court to the contrary, officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement managed to convince themselves that Thomas Warziniack was born in Russia. So they detained and planned to deport him. He is just one of hundreds of victims caught up in an unforgiving bureaucracy who beg, often without recourse, to be taken seriously.
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Angel Boligan, El Universal, Mexico City —
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 politico.com
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Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney is engaged in a make-or-break contest in Michigan, and his eleventh-hour mailers to supporters are striking an urgent note, as evidenced by this recent swipe at rivals John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee over their stands on immigration.
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By Joe Conason — A presidential run by the New York mayor would be a monument to egotism. Even worse, it might prevent the nation from ridding itself of today’s destructive policies.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — With respect to Latino voters, politicians find themselves between a surge and a backlash. While popular anti-immigrant rhetoric could help Republicans take back House seats, it could well cost them the presidency.
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 YouTube
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Before Mitt Romney takes such a hard line against undocumented workers, he might try to find an American citizen willing to cut the grass at his suburban Boston home. For the second time in a year, the candidate has been caught employing undocumented immigrants by way of a landscaping company, which he has now fired.
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By Amy Goodman — The CNN personality, who continues to beat the drum against “illegal aliens,” claims to be a journalist. If he really is one, he should respect facts and correct errors. Let’s all hold our breath until that happens.
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By Marie Cocco — The English language won’t be done in by the influx of Latin Americans. To see the fallacy of this warning, just take a little look at American history.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The CNN/YouTube debate was a depressing spectacle. There was little inspiration for the future, no sense that Republicans are grappling with why their party has become so unpopular, and few departures from rigid adherence to the party line on taxes, guns, gay rights and other questions.
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 AP photo / Thibault Camus
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Unrest has broken out in the city of Toulouse in southern France as riots continued for a third night in Paris. France’s prime minister has called the youths involved “criminals,” and President Nicolas Sarkozy has scheduled an emergency meeting of his security staff for Wednesday.
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 foxnews.com
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Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani clearly shares a particular personality trait with President Bush: the kind of unassailable certainty that even evidence to the contrary can’t uproot. Take his position on the Iraq war, for example, which he still believes—even more so, now—was the right move for the U.S. to have made.
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 AP photo / Thibault Camus
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French youths rioted for a second night in the suburbs of Paris, injuring nearly 80 police officers and torching more than 70 buildings and cars. Police officials said the violence was “far worse” than two years ago, when rioters set fire to 10,000 cars and 300 buildings over three weeks.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has taken some well-deserved heat for its ersatz “press conference” held in response to October’s California wildfires, but, as it happens, FEMA wasn’t the first to stage such a smoke-and-mirrors act.
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By Marie Cocco — The turkey may share the table with lasagna or guacamole or Asian-style rice bowls. Welcome to America, Pilgrim.
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By Eugene Robinson — Finally, we’ve got a real presidential campaign on our hands. Wake up, those of you in the back row, because it looks as if the long-running seminar is finally over.
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 nytimes.com
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Rudy Giuliani is on the defensive over immigration, which has become this campaign’s hot-button distraction. In response to criticism from his opponents that, as mayor of New York, Giuiani had the audacity not to arrest hospitalized immigrants, the candidate has promised to end illegal immigration within three years. At the center of his strategy is a virtual fence he’d like to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.
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By Joe Conason — As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spar over Social Security, their argument has shed little light on America’s most successful domestic program but has instead revealed unattractive aspects of both candidates.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — More significant than Clinton’s supposed gaffe in the Philadelphia debate is the subject around which she tiptoed so delicately: Immigration is the issue Democrats fear because it could leave them with a set of no-win political choices.
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By Marie Cocco — A contemporary Willie Horton has turned up in the Democratic presidential campaign, and so far he is winning. No such person sat in the Drexel University auditorium during the Democrats’ debate on Tuesday night. But the candidates, especially the unprepared front-runner, Hillary Clinton, should long ago have recognized that Republicans and a shrill conservative chorus intend to make Hispanic illegal immigrants the Willie Hortons of 2008.
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By Eugene Robinson — An impotent GOP is beating up immigrants, sick kids and foreign countries in the feeble hope that grateful voters will stick it to the Democrats next year.
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And now, some news from the right side of the aisle: Presidential hopeful Ron Paul chatted with conservative talk show host Steve Gill about his recent fundraising success, domestic and foreign policy issues, and 9/11 and its aftermath, blasting the neocons for using the Sept. 11 attacks to advance their agenda: “If the mafia attacks someone in this country, we don’t bomb Italy,” Paul said.
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Photo by Arturo Perez y Perez / Courtesy of Malaleche
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By Rosa-Linda Fregoso — Cinema, communication and American studies scholar Rosa-Linda Fregoso takes a look at recent exhibitions and installations by the Colectivo Malaleche, a Mexican artists’ collective that addresses the plight of women, migrants and other vulnerable groups through their work.
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 AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Chris Hedges — Bill Clinton has written a new book about charity, a fitting subject for a president who betrayed the poor and led his party into the arms of corporate America.
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KPFA Radio’s “The War Comes Home” series tells the story of Philippe Louis Jean, an Iraq war veteran whom the U.S. government shamefully tried to deport—once he came home. Louis Jean had a green card, but a previous adultery charge was enough for the government to throw him in prison for 10 months.
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 AP Photo / Charlie Niebergall
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By Bill Boyarsky — If a Democrat wins the next presidential election, she or he will have to tackle battles abroad—and, no less significantly, at home. Boyarsky predicts that, after ending the Iraq war, a Democratic president would “immediately be confronted with domestic issues that have no Democratic consensus, issues in which debate is charged with deep feelings about national, ethnic and racial identity.”
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 AP Photo / Julio Cortez
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After leaving the sanctuary of the Chicago church where she held off immigration authorities for a year, Mexican immigration activist Elvira Arellano was arrested and deported after speaking out at an immigrants’ rights demonstration in Los Angeles. Now in Tijuana, Arellano will continue her efforts to reunite with her American-born son and will keep fighting for families divided by immigration laws.
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By Marie Cocco — The corpse has a pulse. Or at least the Bush White House and congressional Republicans are counting on the predictable thump, thump, thump about taxes to resuscitate themselves.
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Civil rights leader Al Sharpton and Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott have found common ground on the issue of immigration reform. Appearing at the annual conference of the Hispanic organization La Raza, the unlikely cohorts gave speeches demanding a revival of the immigration debate. Sharpton raised the specter of racism and criticized presidential candidates who, he said, wink at voters of color and then often fail to deliver.
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By Andy Borowitz — This satirical report says millions of immigrants are seeking an amnesty deal like the one given to the man they revere as “El Libbre.” Who knew Libby would become the hero of America’s undocumented worker population?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Cooling the flames of his campaign, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has turned toward “fraternité” in his style of governance, striking a sharp contrast with the divisive politics of George W. Bush (aka The Uniter).
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The nation is unhappy over Washington’s many flops, and the failure of the immigration bill is the latest result of the voters’ crankiness.
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 foxnews.com
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It turns out that 1.5 miles of a seven-year-old border fence between the U.S. and Mexico was accidentally built between one and six feet into Mexican territory. Mexico wants it moved as soon as possible, which could cost the U.S. more than $3 million.
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After attempting to collaborate on a workable immigration bill, President Bush and the Senate couldn’t see eye to eye on the issue. The vote count fell 14 short of the 60 required to pass the bill Thursday.
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 AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
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When you combine a goat with an electric fence you get the solution ... to illegal immigration? That’s Sen. Trent Lott’s answer to the immigration question.
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