I'll say it again (and again). The wingnuts have already been framing their anti-immigration stance for years. Dems are going to have to face this someday and we're already behind the curve. The wingnuts want to militarize the border (Mexico side, not Canada side), build walls, and otherwise chase Brown skins around. They sanitize their program by claiming to be interested only in "enforcing the law" and "national security".
Dems need to focus this the same way as the Choice issue: We are not for "illegality". We ARE for "national security". We are also for civil rights, humane treatment, and social justice. Just as we are NOT for "abortion," we are FOR CHOICE---and wingnut-fundies are NOT "pro-Life" they are ANTI-CHOICE.
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http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=589Broken Record
Lou Dobbs' daily 'Broken Borders' CNN segment has focused on immigration for years. But there's one issue Dobbs just won't take on.
By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok
.... For more than two years now, Dobbs has served up a populist approach to immigration on nightly segments of his newscast entitled "Broken Borders." He has relentlessly covered the issue, although hardly from a traditional news perspective -- Dobbs favors clamping down on illegal immigration, and his "reporting" never fails to make that clear. He has covered the same issues, and the same anti-immigration leaders, time after time after time. In recent months,
Dobbs has run countless upbeat reports on the "citizen border patrols" that have sprung up around the country since last April's Minuteman Project, a paramilitary effort to seal the Arizona border.
But there's one thing Lou Dobbs won't do. No matter what others report about the movement, Dobbs has failed
to present mounting and persistent evidence of anti-Hispanic racism in anti-immigration groups and citizen border patrols. It's not that Dobbs hasn't allowed a pro-immigration activist or two to complain about efforts like the Minuteman Project ("vigilantes," according to President Bush), or even that
he has made racist statements on his show. What the anchorman has done is
repeatedly decline to present the evidence that links these groups to racism, calling the very idea "mind-boggling." On his July 29 show, he called the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which he said he liked in other ways, "despicable" and "reprehensible" for saying otherwise. ....
GLENN SPENCER,
JOE MCCUTCHEN
BILL PARMLEY,
PAUL STREITZ,
BARBARA COE,
CHRIS SIMCOX,
Dobbs is revered in anti-immigration quarters and on the far right generally. He is the winner of the 2004 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration, given by the
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). CIS claims to be a "nonpartisan research institute," but in fact is
a thinly disguised anti-immigration organization. The 2005 Katz Award went to the immigration beat reporter for The Washington Times, a hard-right newspaper based in Washington, D.C. ....
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