The Hollywood Liberal

Pawlenty Not Being Vetted
Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) — “rumored to be high on John McCain’s short list for vice president — says he hasn’t been asked for ‘any documents’ by the campaign of the presumed Republican nominee,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Ignorance And Hatred And The Price Immigrants Pay
It would be a good thing, really, to have a rational national debate about immigration. But at every turn, the nativist right makes clear that it’s far more intent on promoting bellicose bigotry fueled by ignorance and hypocrisy. The more ignorant and stupid, it seems, the better.

Photo courtesy FailBlog.

It would be a good thing, really, to have a rational national debate about immigration. But at every turn, the nativist right makes clear that it’s far more intent on promoting bellicose bigotry fueled by ignorance and hypocrisy. The more ignorant and stupid, it seems, the better.

Down in LA this weekend the National Council of La Raza held its annual conference, and Barack Obama spoke there. Now, the nativist contingent, as well as its willfully misinformed movement-conservative defenders, love to attack NCLR as “racist” — because they ignorantly translate “La Raza” as “the race.” We’ve dispensed with this senescent little turd previously, but to quickly recap: “La Raza,” as the Wikipedia entry accurately explains, is correctly translated not as “the race” but “the people,” since it refers generically to “the people of Latin America” (or more narrowly, “of Mexico”). It’s generically a multiracial term, not a racist one.

And so, sure enough, the nativist protesters showed up outside the gathering and broadly waved their ignorance about. As kyledeb at Citizen Orange reports, the signs read as follows:

“Support Americans Not La Raza”,
“La Raza Means ‘The Race'”,
“La Raza Stop the Hate Against Americans”,
“La Raza, Neo-Nazi, KKK, Racist Groups”,
“Obama: 50% White, 43.75% Arabic, 6.25% Black, 100% Brown RACIST”

But that’s not all they were trotting out to the scene:

Just as I was about to turn away from filming a man holding a sign of a boy urinating on the phrase “La Raza”, I heard him begin to chant, “Fuck You Brown Boy. Fuck You Brown Boy. Fuck You Brown Boy.” The San Diego Minuteman supporter was walking up a ramp to the convention center and was speaking to another full-grown man that looked to be of latino descent to me.

In all fairness, I have no idea what the latino man was saying to the San Diego Minutemenn supporter. It could have been just as hateful. I followed them until they parted ways and just as I was about to stop filming again, a group of people walked through chanting, “Viva La Raza. Viva La Raza.” The Minuteman supporter then went at it again, “Fuck La Raza. Fuck La Raza. Fuck La Raza.”

It’s easy to dismiss all this as just so many heated words. But then you see incidents like the massive raids in Iowa, where children are separated from their parents and huimans treated like cattle, and realize that it’s much more than that. The toxic effect of this kind of ignorance produces human travesties — like the one in Tennessee in which a very pregnant Latino woman was taken to jail, then transferred to the city hospital when her water broke, where she was shackled to her bed, and forced to deliver her child under those circumstances.

Political Salsa has all the details:

— A woman, three days before delivery of her fourth AMERICAN child, was wrongly arrested and incarcerated.

— Her water broke while she was in jail; she was transported to Metro General Hospital.

— When the nurse asked her to undress to get into hospital clothes, the sheriff’s guard was asked to leave for the moment. He — yes, he — refused. So she had to undress in front of him. …

— Then, while in labor, she was handcuffed by her wrist and ankle to the bed. I’ve seen women in labor, and they constantly are shifting positions to try and get some sense of relief, if that is even possible. Now consider the pain if handcuffs prevented your movement.

— Thankfully, the handcuffs were taken off two hours before she delivered. But then she was restrained again in bed a day later. And every trip to the bathroom required leg shackles. When the nurse strongly objected, the sherrif’s department stayed absolute. The nurse said the new mother would not be able to clean herself properly with shackles. The sheriff’s guard said it didn’t matter; he was doing his job.

… — It also didn’t matter if the baby received the critical mother’s milk in its first days of life. The child was removed from its mother, and Ms. DeLaPaz was returned to jail.

— The final injury inflicted upon this CIVIL/MISDEMEANOR offender was the denial of her use of a breast pump to express her milk for the baby and her own comfort. The nurse again strongly objected, but the sheriff’s department again played law enforcer, physician and God.

The child later was diagnosed with jaundice — a result of not getting its mother’s breast milk.

Sure, it’s just one mother, one kid. But when ignorance rules our discourse and drives our public policy — including our law enforcement — you know that whatever comes out is not going to be good. Scenes like these, incidents like these, are repeated endlessly, usually never reported. And a hundred other little human travesties like them follow as well. It happens a drop at a time, but the toll adds up.

Obama VeepStakes

Via Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money who has some thoughts of his own, Kathy G at the G Spot gives a rundown and her rankings of possible vice-presidential candidates for Sen. Barack Obama. Her longer post with her reasoning is here.

Kathy's top three: Sherrod Brown, John Edwards and Kathleen Sebelius.

Scott likes Sebelius and Edwards.

My thoughts right now: The only ones that create any sense of enthusiasm are Hillary and John Edwards. My past thinking on Sebelius is here.

Facts Are Stupid Things
And the New York Times doesn’t want you to have access to them.

Doing Their Jobs
Josh is right that the press should tell us about Randy Scheunemann’s past, but they won’t because to them it’s an unremarkable past. Half of Washington was in bed with Chalabi. He was a special guest at the 2004 State of the Union. To the elite beltway press, these were and are very serious people. There was absolutely nothing wrong with teaming up with Chalabi to con the nation into war. It isn’t remarked upon because to them it’s completely unremarkable.

SUCK ON THAT AMERICA

Deb Price: Changing Hearts and Minds on Gay Marriage
Young activists are trying to reach out to conservative voters.

Changing Hearts and Minds on Gay Marriage
Young activists are trying to reach out to conservative voters.

Poll Suggests Deep-Red South Dakota May Be In Play
Wow. A new Rasmussen poll suggests that Barack Obama could be putting in play the very red state of South Dakota, which hasn’t voted Democratic for president since the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide. The numbers: McCain 47%, Obama 43%. Compare…

Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the tragedy of Jesse Jackson….

Report: MI5 ‘out-sourced’ torture
MP’s call for investigation of British citizens sent to Pakistan for interrogations.

McCain forgets that Czechoslovakia isn?t a country? again.
During a press availability today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he’s been concerned by “a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several day,” including “reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia.” But, as TPM’s Greg Sargent points out, Czechoslovakia hasn’t existed in 15 years. This isn’t the first time McCain […]

During a press availability today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he’s been concerned by “a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several day,” including “reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia.” But, as TPM’s Greg Sargent points out, Czechoslovakia hasn’t existed in 15 years. This isn’t the first time McCain has made this mistake. At a debate in Oct. 2007, McCain said that America needs to “have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia and Poland.”

Digg It!

Self-Interest Is Bad?
Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard

Barack Obama is Coming to Town – Financial Times