My shortest blog entry ever (re Santorum & Co.)

Contraception?????

FAIR isn't fair (except in color)

Why does so much of the media continue to interview spokespersons from FAIR (The Federation For American Immigration Reform) as if it were a reliable source of facts about immigration?

The Southern Poverty Law Center has long been documenting what FAIR really stands for. That documentation, especially concerning their founder John Tanton, is superabundant. Here are a few examples of FAIR verbiage:

* They have insisted that America needs a "European-American majority."

* They have stoked fear over what they call a "Latin onslaught."

* They have fretted that Latinos are "outbreeding" white people.

Founder Tanton -- age 77 and also the founder of the Center For Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA, among other racist organizations -- has promoted the sterilization of unmarried mothers and suggested that less intelligent people be kept from having children. He has a long history of connections with white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, KKK lawyers and the Pioneer Fund. He has defended the 1924 national origin quota system that also banned the immigration of Asians.

All of this is evil enough, but now we have some egomaniacal politicians using racist suggestion around the country as they scramble for votes. It's gonna be a very rough year.

European press on GOP candidates

These quotes come from The Week:

THE GERMAN PRESS

The Republican presidential contest in America is a “freak show,” said Marc Pitzke in the German Der Spiegel. The candidates vie with one another to spew the most outrageous hard-right positions, denying evolution while endorsing torture and joking about electrocuting illegal immigrants. How did a major party in the world’s sole superpower become a “club of liars, debtors, betrayers, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites, and ignoramuses?” These know-nothings are enabled by a U.S. press that has been “neutered by the demands of political correctness” so that it can’t say what’s obvious: These people are daft! Instead, it “proclaims one clown after the next to be the new front-runner.” The current favorite, Newt Gingrich, is actually considered an intellectual merely because he can create sentences with multiple clauses. Scarcely a one has even the most basic grasp of foreign policy. One said Africa is a country, another that the Taliban rule in Libya. Collectively, “they expose a political, economic, geographic, and historical ignorance that makes George W. Bush look like a scholar.”


THE FRENCH PRESS

That’s the scariest part, said Lorraine Millot in the ParisLiberation. The only GOP candidate who knows a thing about diplomacy, Jon Huntsman, is dead last in most polls. The others “careen to extreme positions that include starting new wars and abandoning old allies.” And that’s when they even have a position. Herman Cain, now thankfully out of the race, was the front-runner even though he couldn’t find a single coherent word to say about President Obama’s policy on Libya. He even boasted of knowing little about foreign countries. And yet it was his adultery, not his astounding ignorance that brought him down.


THE ENGLISH PRESS

There’s a simple explanation for this bizarre phenomenon, said Max Hastings in the LondonDaily Mail. In the “lunatic, gun-toting badlands of America’s Hicks-ville, Tea Party country,” it’s considered suspiciously elitist to show any interest in modern science or the world beyond America’s borders. “Say what you like about British politics, no MP of any party would dare to offer themselves as town dog-catcher while knowing as little about the world as the Republican presidential candidates.” We take public service seriously. Yet we in Britain, and everyone in the rest of the world, will suffer if “one of the lunatics” vying for the nomination makes it to the White House. “The American political system has seldom, if ever, looked so inadequate.”
Don’t worry, said Matthew Norman in the LondonIndependent. The fact that Gingrich is the latest threat to Mitt Romney’s inevitability just “confirms how inevitable” Romney’s nomination is. The thrice-married, ethically challenged Gingrich is unlikable in the extreme. Which means the nominee will be Romney, “the slimiest, phoniest opportunist to run for president since...well, ever.” So sit back and enjoy this circus passing for a presidential election. It can’t possibly end in a GOP victory. Can it?