Republicans must think Latino voters are stupid.

As we come out of the Mid-Term Elections of 2010, one thing is absolutely crystal clear: Republicans think Latino voters are stupid . . . really stupid. In state after state Republicans are running ads featuring Latino-looking figures going under, over and around fences which are or are meant to depict our Southern border. Other Republican ads make false and misleading claims about the dangers of illegal immigrants to America. We are urged to be afraid, very afraid of the Republicans’ opponents. Such appeals have even been used by Republican Senate candidate Roy Blunt in Missouri, even though Missouri was a "border state" only during the Civil War. I'll collected quite a few links illustrating this nonsense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU6Xq56CaCE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qP3DBLUOeQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uvp0Jljh6U&feature=related http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2010/10/roy_blunt_looking_for_illegals.php http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgZ1LWLlko http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzDlN7VLmXQ&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVheLuooLUw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE6De4VqFfg Republican US Senate nominee Sharon Angle even used pictures of Mexican nationals in Mexico to try to make her point, and she used the images without the permission of the photographer. Republican jingoism and anti-immigrant distortions have been around for a long time, but now we have another far more sinister effort by Republicans to use immigration and immigrant status as a political tool. A recently minted organization calling itself “Latinos for Reform” sought to air TV ads to urge Latinos not to vote in the Mid Term elections. In Nevada, some 25% of voters are Latinos. The Tea Party, Republicans and their supporters claim that because of Republican obstructionism, which requires 60 votes to pass any bill, a comprehensive immigration bill is good reason to punish Democrats in 2010. The man who put this effort together formerly worked for the Republican National Committee and his treasurer is a Republican lobbyist. The Post Office Box of “Latinos for Reform” is the same as that of the group that gave us the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” in 2004. These efforts by Republicans and their Tea Party supporters may have borne fruit in the 2010 elections but, with some one third of the US population projected to be of Hispanic descent by the end of the century, such short-sighted efforts will only serve to alienate the Hispanic voters and encourage their voting patterns to tend toward those of the African-American community, which approach 90% Democratic support. Republicans may politically profit by their xenophobic racism, but in the long run they will likely only do themselves extreme long-lasting damage among Latino voters.

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Good questions for Bank of America

Dan Froomkin summarizes the antics of Bank of America. William K. Black has a lot of unanswered questions for Bank of America.

Black, writing alone, also corrected President Obama’s assertion during his interview with Jon Stewart, that chief economic adviser Larry Summers had done a “heckuva job.” Summers did not resolve the financial crisis, Black wrote, he just papered over the problem. In another solo effort, Black warned that papering over the problem will actually increase the total cost of the crisis in the long run, and he concluded that “the administration's banking policies have attained the terrible trifecta: terrible economics, terrible ethics, and terrible politics.”

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Lessons Learned?

What can be drawn from this recent election that speaks to America? To listen to the bombast, this election is all about money. Who has it, where it comes from, what it’s to be spent on, when to cut it off. An angry electorate looking at massive job loss and all that that implies tossed out the previous majority in Congress over money. This is not difficult to understand. People are frightened that they will no longer be able to pay their bills, keep their homes, send their children to college. Basic stuff. Two years into the current regime and foreclosures are still high, unemployment still high, fear level still high, and the only bright spot concerns people who are seemingly so far removed from such worries as to be on another plain of existence. The stock market has been steadily recovering over the last two years. Which means the economy is growing. Slowly. Economic forecasters talking on the radio go on and on about the speed of the recovery and what it means for jobs. Out of the other end of the media machine, concern over illegal immigrants and outsourcing are two halves of the same worry. Jobs are going overseas, and those that are left are being filled by people who don’t even belong here. The government has done nothing about either—except in Arizona, where a law just short of a kind of fascism has been passed, and everyone else has been ganging up on that state, telling them how awful they are. And of course seemingly offering nothing in place of a law that, for it’s monumental flaws, still is something. [More . . . ]

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Time to blame China again

In the months before September 11, 2001, I was startled to hear many politicians and media outlets drumming up potential military conflict between the United States and China. I remember this well, because my wife and I had recently adopted a Chinese baby, and she was our second Chinese daughter.  I feared that this wild lashing out China would make the United States a bad place to raise our babies.  Here's a sample of the kind of things that you would see back then, this excerpt from a report issued by the Rand Corporation:

According to a newly released Rand Corp. report, China's military is narrowing its technology gap with the U.S. armed forces using U.S. commercial technology. Beijing is developing advanced systems and its military capabilities may approach or equal the United States in some areas, the study says. . . According to Jack Spencer, a defense analyst and fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the Chinese military is preparing itself for a future war with America.

Consider also this excerpt
The Bush administration has made hostility to China one of its foreign policy principles. Bush attacked the Clinton-Gore administration during the 2000 elections, declaring that China was a “strategic competitor,” not a “strategic partner” of the United States. A series of initiatives in the last three months have been directed against Beijing—moves toward a US missile defense focused on China, reversal of US policy for a rapprochement with North Korea, and plans to supply sophisticated naval and air weaponry to Taiwan.

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