Hurricane Isaac has inconvenienced a lot of people.

Many thousands of Gulf Coast residents have boarded up windows and sought shelter inland. And many others are now facing the prospect of cleaning up and rebuilding flooded homes and businesses.

But the inconvenienced people we’ve been hearing about most are the pundits and politicians who gathered in Tampa this week for the Republican National Convention. ( continue to full post… )

Kris Kobach, the immigrant-baiting attorney behind a raft of “attrition through enforcement” laws designed to make unauthorized immigrants’ lives so miserable that they choose to “self-deport,” is letting his Islamophobic colors fly.

Talking Points Memo reported last week that the Republican National Convention (RNC) has amended its platform to include a ban on “foreign law.” Kobach introduced the plank, saying, “I’m not aware of any court that’s actually accepted the argument, but in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Shariah Law.”

Shariah law is Islamic religious law, and the far political right has spent much of the last two years ginning up groundless fears that it will be imposed on the United States — an impossibility under the Constitution. Already, two states have banned “foreign law” based on those fears, and close to two dozen others have considered such statutes despite Oklahoma’s law being struck down last January. ( continue to full post… )

Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and the architect of harsh, anti-immigrant laws in several states and cities, made a special trip to Hatewatch’s home state last week to testify in Birmingham before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The statutes pushed by Kobach – among them Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s even more draconian HB 56 – were devised to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they give up and “self-deport.” A lawyer with degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, he began crafting anti-immigrant policy while working in John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice. In 2004, he was hired as senior counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), where he devised immigration legislation that would later serve as the basis of the laws in Arizona and Alabama. (IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant hate group that yearns for a return to the days when immigration policy favored light-skinned northern Europeans over all others.) ( continue to full post… )

It’s long been something of a mystery how conservative Republicans can expect to keep winning elections when so many of them spend their time dissing Latinos, a critical and rapidly growing portion of the electorate. Indeed, many Latino rights organizations argue persuasively that it was Latino voters who took Barack Obama over the top in the 2008 presidential election.

But that hasn’t stopped large numbers of conservative leaders, perhaps even the majority, from embracing anti-Latino rhetoric, activists and organizations. A case in point is how many of these politicians have gotten into bed with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and its legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). IRLI, its chief legal counsel Michael Hethmon and another lawyer, Kris Kobach, have been behind the vast majority of recent, draconian anti-immigrant laws, including those in Arizona and, worst of all, Alabama. ( continue to full post… )

The suspect who shot and killed a Pennsylvania police officer and wounded a second policeman over the weekend died himself Monday in a gunfight with lawmen who surrounded his house in Webster, Pa.

Eli Franklin Myers III, 58, died in a hail of gunfire after he exited his home on Logan Street, firing a large-caliber handgun at Special Response Team officers who had identified him as the suspect in the deadly police shooting the previous night. ( continue to full post… )

No one knows for sure what was going through the head of 18-year-old Joaquin Luna Jr. when he committed suicide last month. His family told reporters they suspect he was motivated by despair over the limitations posed by his status as an undocumented immigrant. His suicide note (which the family had not yet seen when they made their initial comments to the press), included no reference to immigration status – though in a letter addressed to Jesus Christ, Luna reportedly asked for forgiveness and wrote, “I’ve realized that I have no chance in becoming a civil engineer the way I’ve always dreamed of here … so I’m planning on going to you and helping you construct the new temple in heaven.”

Luna’s half-brother, Diyer Mendoza, 35, told reporters that Luna, who was an infant when his parents brought him from Mexico to the United States, was in despair over the obstacles to education and employment his immigration status posed. “We lived with him, so we know, and it doesn’t matter what other people say,” he said. “Every time he would put in an application, the first thing that would pop up was ‘Are you a U.S. citizen?’ No. ‘Resident?’ No. ‘Social Security number?’ No. It was all just mounting and mounting on top of him. I truly believe that if that Dream Act would have already passed, he would still be here today.”
( continue to full post… )

Boycotts are a time-honored and almost always legal tool that has been used throughout American history by activists across the political spectrum to help force or prevent certain actions. Most people see the decision not to buy from particular outlets as a legitimate and precious part of our First Amendment rights.

Anti-gay religious groups, however, apparently have a different view. And it sounds a whole lot like, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

It’s well known that many such groups have led boycotts of companies that support LGBT rights, typically because they supposedly back “the homosexual lifestyle” or produce risque entertainment. But when LGBT supporters call for boycotts of companies that support anti-gay causes and rhetoric — as they have in recent weeks — well, that’s when the very same anti-gay religious groups begin to whine about “discrimination,” “economic terrorism,” and “bullying.” ( continue to full post… )

Anti-Muslim zealot Pamela Geller’s new film starts with a thud – literally. It’s the sound of a body striking a ground-level roof after plunging from lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center towers shortly after Islamic terrorists flew two jetliners into them in 2001.

Just in case that gratuitously shocking audio image wasn’t gut-wrenching enough, video clips of people leaping from the burning towers – and one striking a roof below – follow. Indeed, the greater part of Geller’s film, “The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks,” is devoted not to making the case for its hyperbolic title, but merely stirring once again the pain, loss and outrage of the 2001 attack. The movie was screened for the first time at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s (CPAC) annual convention Saturday. The film will make its New York City premiere on Feb. 20 – Muhammad’s birthday.

The movie, produced by Geller, founder of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), and Robert Spencer, principal of the Jihad Watch website, examines the controversy over the Park51 project – the so-called Ground Zero “mega-mosque.” Developer Sharif El-Gamal purchased the unoccupied building at 45-51 Park Place in lower Manhattan – two blocks from the World Trade Center site – in June 2009. He and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf received city approval to build a 13-story mosque and community center there.

The “seminal, ground-breaking” film (as described on SIOA’s website) is intended to cast the Park51 controversy as a critical turning point in America’s war on terror – but despite incessant yanks on the viewer’s heartstrings, the 87-minute film makes a remarkably thin case for its provocative claim that it represented “the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.” The first 35 minutes and the last 20 minutes are almost entirely devoted to an emotional recounting the horror of the 9/11 attacks – often from the viewpoint of surviving family members – and a belabored critique of the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring or slanting the mosque controversy. The half-hour in between takes a cursory, one-sided look at questions about Rauf and El-Gamal, their financing, and about their alleged connections to radical Islamic figures. ( continue to full post… )

The Social Contract magazine, the most overtly white nationalist organ of John Tanton’s network of anti-immigrant organizations, so outdid itself with its fall 2010 edition calling for a ban on Muslim immigration that even some of its readership reacted with distaste.

The 68-page volume was packed with anti-Islamic rhetoric and featured contributions from Muslim-bashers like Stop Islamization of America founder Pam Geller; right-wing attack dog Ann Coulter, who once called Islam a “car-burning cult,” and Stella Paul, who writes about Islam for the far-right magazine American Thinker, where she recently described President Obama as “rapper-in-chief.” It closed with an essay by K.C. McAlpin, who described Islam as a “hostile, intolerant, and totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion” that “needs to be quarantined in the failed states it has already infected.”

McAlpin, who last July took a new job as a kind of successor to long-time mentor Tanton, apparently got some pushback from readers of the racist magazine — a remarkable thing, given that the journal has published such things as a special issue entitled “Europhobia: the Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.” The issue railed against multiculturalism, arguing that it was replacing “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.” The other journal principals are Wayne Lutton, a one-time member of white supremacist hate groups, and Kevin Lamb, who has written for white supremacist publications. ( continue to full post… )

The Salt Lake Tribune on Sunday published a lengthy investigative report on the origins of the immigration bill proposed by Utah State Rep. Stephen Sandstrom (R-Orem). Chief among the story’s findings is that Michael Hethmon, general counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), played a major role in crafting the bill.

IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nativist extremist hate group with a penchant for hiring officials who are active in white supremacist organizations and write for anti-immigrant hate sites. FAIR characterizes itself as just another conservative-leaning organization seeking to tighten enforcement of immigration law, but it is the flagship of a network of organizations created by John Tanton, the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement who has produced an abundance of white nationalist commentary. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated FAIR as a hate group. ( continue to full post… )