GILA BEND, Ariz. — Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.

Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.

By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.

“In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness,” the elder Mr. Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. “But we outwitted them. We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!” — [READ MORE]

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MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more “law-abiding, emptier and whiter.”

Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.

“It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,” said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees. — [MORE]

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Behind The Veil: America’s Anti-Immigration Network — Video details the common origins of many of the country’s leading anti-immigration groups and their ties to White supremacists.

Lou Dobbs and Codewords Of Hate — A study by the Anti-Defamation League on the use of hate rhetoric in the immigration debate

Popularity: 3% [?]

The “Killa From Wasilla” came to the debate armed to the teeth with Republican talking points. She wasn’t afraid, she had the confidence — that of a robot programmed to “Vomit Policy.”

“Sarah The Barracuda” was pesky, scripted, loud, shrill and incoherent, as she rattled whatever her coaches had crammed into her head, with abandon.

For the entire ninety minutes she shuffled her “cheat sheets,” as if she were taking an “Open Book-Open Notes” Exam or participating in a Spelling Bee contest. She scraped and fought hard, spewing “Gibberish” by the bucket.

Ms. Palin exhibited little spontaneity and looked thoroughly rehearsed — sometimes avoided answering questions directly, instead slid into irrelevant sound-bites about her tenure as mayor of “tiny-town” Wasilla, Alaska.

On foreign policy, Palin stalled — giving generic non-specific answers, and when she resorted to her juvenile chants — “Maverick!,” “We are mavericks!,” “We are a maverick team!,” Biden promptly shot her down: “McCain wasn’t a maverick on ‘the things that matter to people’s lives,‘ citing issues such as health care, education and the war.” “He’s not been a maverick on virtually anything that genuinely affects the things that people really talk about around their kitchen table,” Biden said.

The debate format was not confrontational, and Joe Biden avoided engaging her, for fear of being labeled sexist. Had he forced her to deviate from her script, the results would have been disastrous. She would have forgotten her lines and gone off on some of her moronic, meaningless rambles.

CNN’s political analyst Bill Schneider was critical: “Palin’s answers do not lack confidence, they lack coherence.”

Newsweek’s Harold Fineman: “Palin was like ‘A Wolverine’ Attacking The Pant Leg Of
A Passerby.”

Start of the Vice Presidential Debate

Vice Presidential Debate: “Maverick He Is Not”

Joe Biden — We will end this war

CNN - Post Debate Analysis

| More Video [1] | More Video [2] |

Joe Biden on the other hand was remarkably restrained, awash with policy and his vast knowledge and experience clearly showed. He offered much more detail on a range of topics, from national security to domestic issues, and relentlessly lumped McCain with Bush.

While Sarah acted like a “frisky” freshman debater, Joe was polished and presidential in his delivery.

Per Bob Shrum, Palin did not fall down on the stage — she survived.

Her performance was much better than I expected, because of one and only one reason — the debate format allowed her to stick to her rehearsed script. There were barely any follow-ups by the moderator, unlike in the first Obama-McCain debate, when vigorous follow-ups revealed the stark differences, weaknesses and strengths of the two candidates.

In this debate, Palin was allowed to verbally diarrhea “crammed policy,” like an express train without brakes, spewing useless garbage, winking and giving a “shout-out” to some high school in Alaska!

Give me a break! How stupid does one have to be not to read through this nonsense?

She is a total embarrassment — an affront to intellectualism, a trait I insist must be part of the package of a serious contender for the presidency of this great land.

“Hockey Moms” stay home and manage their families, they do not run for an office where they might be required to manage the largest stockpile of nuclear and biological weapons on earth.

My assessment is that Sarah Palin is not ready. She still knows nothing. Go Home Sarah!

“This is going to help stop the bleeding,” said Todd Harris, a Republican consultant who worked for Mr. McCain in his first presidential campaign. “But this alone won’t change the trend line, particularly in some of the battleground states.”

Partisan right-wing THUGS had other ideas:

“Sarah Palin was sensational tonight,” roared White Nationalist Bigot Pat Buchanan, in a post-debate comment on the MSNBC cable network. “She regained that magic she had at the convention.”

Joining the maniacal squealing, were the SYPHILITIC NATIVIST NAZIS at Fox News. Festooned around their racist brains is the falsehood that Sarah Palin won the debate hands down.

Sarah’s “Spelling-Bee Performance” must have injected a shot of liquid cannabis into their soiled veins.

Morons!

Well, ALL post-debate polls indicate that Biden thrashed her decisively, while holding back his fire considerably.

But then what’s to be expected of the “FIX” News Channel?

Popularity: 8% [?]

I keep my TV on CNN all the time; I’m surprised the CNN logo hasn’t been permanently etched on my screen. I’m a political news junkie, and when I’m not watching CNN or MSNBC I’m reading the online news sites.

   McCain and Palin [ Enlarge ]
But even I was surprised when John McCain selected a virtual unknown, Sarah Palin, as his vice-presidential running mate. Like millions of other Americans I googled Palin to find out everything I could about her.

The most shocking and disturbing fact that I learned is that Palin is totally unqualified to be one heartbeat away from assuming the mantle of leader of the free world. The sum total of her political experience is one and half years as governor of Alaska, and six years as a part-time mayor of a small town outside Anchorage. Her resume qualifies her to work in a Moose petting zoo, but it falls far short as preparation to be the president of the United States.

Not only is Palin unqualified, she also far to the right of most Americans. Palin is vehemently anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest. The former beauty queen supported the anti-Semitic, anti-immigration Pat Buchanan for president in 2000. The governor from Alaska is an evangelical Christian who believes that creationism should be taught in public schools. Unlike most Americans, Palin doesn’t believe that humans are responsible for global warming.

Palin is unqualified and unvetted, McCain met her only twice before offering her the vice-presidency. A Burger King applicant undergoes a more rigorous vetting process before he’s offered a position flipping burgers.

Palin is unqualified, unvetted and under an ethical cloud, lawmakers in her home state are investigating whether she abused her power in firing a public safety commissioner.

Palin’s stump speeches since McCain named her as his Veep have done nothing to ease my worries. Her high-pitched delivery will drive even her most ardent supporters nuts over the next two months. This is not a sexist jibe, I have also criticized Obama for his tentative delivery in debates. For someone who is frequently lauded as eloquent, Obama has a habit of saying “you know” or “ah” almost every other sentence.

In her first three appearances Palin has delivered the same speech with only slight variations. This indicates a person who can’t think on her feet; she relies on memory more than smarts. I do give her props for removing any mention of Hillary Clinton from her stump speech, after she was booed for giving her credit for cracking the glass ceiling.

Sarah Palin is Patrick Buchanan in a beehive and high heels; and I tremble at the thought that one day she may be president of the United States.

John McCain has irrevocably stained his reputation with this desperate act of political expedience. To appeal to Hillary’s disaffected voters and to appease the right wing of his party, McCain has put the security and safety of America at grave risk.

I’m hoping that Americans will punish John McCain for his reckless act by voting for Obama/Biden in November.

REFERENCES:

1. 8 Reasons Sarah Palin is More Qualified than Barack Obama

Popularity: 11% [?]

From Jörg Colberg’s weblog:

If Obama Loses: “If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin. Much evidence points to racial prejudice as a factor that could be large enough to cost Obama the election.” ….[READ MORE >>]

From Jacob Weisberg writing for Slate.com

Let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin. Much evidence points to racial prejudice as a factor that could be large enough to cost Obama the election.

Five percent of white voters acknowledge that they, personally, would not vote for a black candidate. Five percent surely understates the reality. In the Pennsylvania primary, one in six white voters told exit pollsters race was a factor in his or her decision. Seventy-five percent of those people voted for Clinton. You can do the math: 12 percent of the Pennsylvania primary electorate acknowledged that it didn’t vote for Barack Obama in part because he is African-American. And that’s what Democrats in a Northeastern(ish) state admit openly. The responses in Ohio and even New Jersey were dispiritingly similar.

Such prejudice usually comes coded in distortions about Obama and his background. To the willfully ignorant, he is a secret Muslim married to a black-power radical. Or—thank you, Geraldine Ferraro—he only got where he is because of the special treatment accorded those lucky enough to be born with African blood. Some Jews assume Obama is insufficiently supportive of Israel in the way they assume other black politicians to be. To some white voters (14 percent in the CBS/New York Times poll), Obama is someone who, as president, would favor blacks over whites. Or he is an “elitist” who cannot understand ordinary (read: white) people because he isn’t one of them. Or he is charged with playing the race card, or of accusing his opponents of racism, when he has strenuously avoided doing anything of the sort. We’re just not comfortable with, you know, a Hawaiian.

Then there’s the overt stuff. In May, Pat Buchanan, who writes books about the European-Americans losing control of their country, ranted on MSNBC in defense of white West Virginians voting on the basis of racial solidarity. The No. 1 best-seller in America, Obama Nation by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., leeringly notes that Obama’s white mother always preferred that her “mate” be “a man of color.” John McCain has yet to get around to denouncing this vile book. ….[READ MORE >>]

Paul Street for ZMAG Writes:

….Barack Obama told reporters that if he lost in his quest for the presidency, “it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.”

“….like many of Obama’s formulations, his comment was partly true and largely false.”

If Obama loses to the reactionary war-mongering nut-job John McCain despite a political context that would normally strongly favor a Democrat this time around, the refusal of a significant number of white voters to support a black candidate will be a significant part of the explanation. ….[READ MORE >>]

Bob Herbert of The New York Times says:

So what’s the problem for the Obama campaign?

The problem is the dog that isn’t barking.

Talk for more than a few minutes with an Obama supporter in a white middle-class or working-class area and you’ll hear about a friend or relative or co-worker who has a real problem with the candidate.

When Jack Davis’s wife, Joan, who also plans to vote for Senator Obama, was asked about Democrats that she knew who would not vote for him, she replied:

“My mother! She’s 85 years old. I’m sorry to say, but she will not vote for him.”

It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters — or decline to state their preference — in races in which one candidate is black and the other white.

After many years of watching black candidates run for public office, and paying especially close attention to this year’s Democratic primary race, I’ve developed my own (very arbitrary) rule of thumb regarding the polls in this election:

Take at least two to three points off of Senator Obama’s poll numbers, and assume a substantial edge for Senator McCain in the breakdown of the undecided vote.

[ READ MORE HERE ] — The race issue in Barack Obama’s campaign can come up in peculiar and jolting ways.

REFERENCES:

1. Racist Attacks on Obama Growing More Heated
2. Jerome Corsi: Politician-Basher’s White Supremacist Ties Revisited
3. Hawking Racism — Pat Buchanan’s latest book is a White Nationalist Screed
4. Fox ‘Racist News’ Channel Depicts Pro-Obama Europeans as — ‘Scary’ Black People
5. Obama Smears - Fox News’ Racist Liars On A Rampage!
6. Attack Politics - Taken To New Lows By Fox News Morons!
7. Neo Nazi/White Supremacist Hal Turner Confirms Friendship And Kinship With Fox News’s Sean Hannity

Popularity: 15% [?]

It seems like John McCain has decided that the only way to beat Obama is through mud-flinging, lies and racial innuendo.

When he’s not standing in a supermarket cheese aisle holding forth unsteadily on the definition of the Iraq surge or at a German beer garden outside Columbus (while U.S. Sen. Barack Obama spoke to 200,000 in Berlin), U.S. Sen. John McCain has his eyes on what he sees as the holy grail that will clinch his victory come November 4: offshore drilling, a.k.a. The Big Lie….Melissa Merz –> [MORE >>]

McCain’s Ad — “Painful”

The Obama Team Responds:

Obama’s first Olympic Ad - “Hands”

Obama needs to fight back harder

The so-called low information voter is not capable of assimilating and analyzing “Professorial Presentation,”……they are called low information for a reason: They couldn’t excel in school! They get bored easily, and do little or no research, and therefore tend to gravitate to “things raw, hard-hitting and STUPID,“…..talk radio hearsay, clandestine smears and utter nonsense. Anyone who relies on unscrupulous shysters like Limbaugh or Hannity for information is STUPID….thoroughly well!

John McCain, a Republican is aware of this “Voter Deficiency.” — and will milk it as effectively as every ReTHUGlican presidential candidate has done over the last 40 years.

One of the Democratic Party’s leading electoral street fighters, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, was right when he said that Barack Obama should respond to John McCain’s personal attacks with an equally personal slap.

McCain’s quarter century congressional/senatorial career is littered with “plump fodder” ripe for plucking:

1. Vote For John McCain and Put A Thief In The White House!

Obama is running a campaign based on hope and a positive future. I don’t how he should counter McCain without obscuring his primary message — but I believe the only way to defeat a snake which is spewing deadly venom is to beat it on the head — with a BILLY CLUB!

….More stuff here: Dumb And McDumber

2. John McCain - A temperamental “political chameleon” who dumped crippled first-wife for Cindy and her “Beer Inheritance.” — “Family Values” ReTHUGlican — John McCain is a self-centered womanizer who abandoned his crippled first-wife for his present wife Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons…..Read More Here

3. Thinking about voting for McCain? Read this book (below). McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory — Just because he flew a couple of missions in Vietnam (another illegal war) — then got shot down, and had his NUTS squeezed and his arms broken, is hardly sufficient reason for America to elect another idiot to mess up things even more!!

Editorial Reviews | Book Description: Cliff Schecter’s hard-hitting profile explores the gap between the public record of Senator John McCain and his media image. Drawing on a range of sources and adding his unique perspective and humor, Schecter guides the reader though McCain’s long history of expedient flip-flops–especially on his signature issues of national security and campaign finance reform.

Far from a straight-talking maverick, McCain emerges as a temperamental political chameleon who will do or say virtually anything to become president of the United States. On issue after issue–including the invasion and occupation of Iraq, torture, abortion, and gay rights–The Real McCain reveals a politician who started as a Goldwater Republican, experienced a brief period after sanity after his loss to George W. Bush in 2000, and began pandering to the very groups he challenged after deciding to run again in 2008.

From the Back Cover: Cliff Schecter provides us with some real “straight talk” about John McCain. Everyone who wants to know why John McCain won’t give us health care but will keep us fighting endless wars and sell our personal freedoms to far-right theocrats should read this book.

Paul Hackett
Major, USMCR

| See More Reviews |

McCain The “Political Chameleon” Flip-Flops!

McSAME The ReTHUGlican Is a Bigger Liar Than His ‘Trusted Counselor’ George McDUMB

| More McCain “Straight Talk” Flip-Flops @ therealmccain.com |

4. Perhaps this video by a fellow snake, “White-Nationalist” THUG Pat Buchanan, indicts McCain best. If I were Obama, I would use this video over and over:

A Fellow Snake, “White-Nationalist” THUG Pat Buchanan Skewers McCain

Popularity: 10% [?]