Karl Rove: “An anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal.”

Read fascinating quotes from GOP leaders waxing eloquent on immigration, courtesy of the website of  the pro-immigration reform America’s Voice.

Many of these quotes seem at odds with the shrill restrictionist tone of current Republican presidential primary candidates.

Mitt Romney photo licensed by Creative Commons.

In the last weeks, Mitt Romney voiced satisfaction over the endorsement of the lawyer who wrote SB1070 and said he’d veto the DREAM Act. (The federal measure, introduced for years but  never passed, would give temporary legal residency to kids who were brought to the United States illegally as minors, came up through our schools, have no criminal records, and want to serve in the armed forces or attend college. If they succeed, they get green cards.)  And now NumbersUSA, a John Tanton spinoff, is sponsoring anti-immigrant ads in South Carolina.

In the meantime, Barack Obama is reaching out to Latinos,  promoting  Cecilia Munoz to domestic policy czarina and making administrative changes in immigration policy.

Who do you think has a better chance in Arizona? Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?

A controversy swirls today over whether failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has been booted from his MSNBC talking-head slot for the  white nationalist tone of his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower.

In the book, Buchanan laments the decline of Americans descended from  white Europeans, and blames multiculturalism for a slew of social problems. He seeks a complete moratorium on immigration.

This sentiment is shared by Jon Tanton, the founder of the Federation of American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, the Washington D.C. based non-profit that reporters often seek out for the “other side” in immigration stories.  (Tanton was also instrumental in founding NumbersUSA and Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS.) FAIR has been branded a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The legal arm of FAIR, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, was instrumental in writing SB 1070.

Pat’s sister, Bay, is one of the founders of the Team America Pac, and if you visit the website you’ll see a link, of course, to FAIR. You’ll also see links to Jon Tanton’s publication VDare, and a number of group you should study. Peel away the layers, and you may agree with me that many share Pat’s indefensible view that multiculturalism is a social ill.

Vaclav Havel, the playwright and dissident who became president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, died just hours before my daughter Sara and son-in-law Hugh loaded us up in their trusty Toyota and drove us from their home in Germany to Prague. We knew Havel  had died because we heard it on CNN just before we left, and we arrived in Prague during its official mourning period  for the beloved, and sometimes annoying, leader. (Annoying because he held on too long to the presidency, could be incredibly moralistic, was sometimes viewed as too passive, according to The New York Times.) But everyone knew he was the hero whose courage to speak out precipitated freedom.

photo of newspaper in Prague by Terry Greene Sterling

Sara booked us in a fabulous apartment right on  Wenceslas Square, where the Russians had shot up the National Museum decades before, in a show of force. Here, too, a couple of students had burned themselves alive to protest Russian occupation. Now the writer-dissident-president who brought change to an  oppressed nation was mourned by thousands who remembered what their country was like under the occupation, and what it is like now — vibrant and smart and cultured. It was of course vibrant and smart and cultured for at least a thousand years, but voices that were muffled were set free after Havel assumed the presidency. He stood for change. And although he wasn’t perfect, people in Prague recognized it.

Photo by Walter Sterling

On the night before Have’s funeral mass,  thousands of people stood in the cold night lined up at St. Vitus Cathedral, in the Prague Castle complex, to say goodbye. Here is a picture I snapped with my iPhone while at St. Vitus.

Photo by Terry Greene Sterling

Throughout Prague, black flags flew and signs saying things like “Goodbye, Vaclav” hung from the ancient buildings.

On Friday, the day of Havel’s funeral mass,  we drove past Wenceslas Square just as sirens blared across the square, and the nation, as the country remembered Havel. Men held their hats to their hearts. Women bowed their heads.

They all remembered the man who had the guts to speak out.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-described toughest sheriff in America, is now in the national spotlight because his office allegedly did not investigate sex crimes in 2005. This is old news in Arizona. In 2008, a Mesa newspaper won a Pulitzer for exposing irregularities in the sheriff’s office — and the apparent siphoning of resources into well-publicized immigration raids instead of community policing — including the investigation of sex crimes in El Mirage.

Here’s a quick geography lesson for those of you who don’t live in Arizona. Maricopa County, which elects the sheriff, is the  most populous county in Arizona. The sheriff is allowed to police every community in Maricopa County, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler , Tempe, Guadalupe and El Mirage.

The sheriff has long been under fire for failing to police while diverting resources to immigration, as I said before. The sheriff’s department has cost the county millions in lawsuits filed by relatives of dead inmates alleged to have died wrongfully, or judges and other county officials who alleged the sheriff’s baseless but well publicised investigations of them were meant to harass them and ruined their careers. Sheriff Joe’s  office has been under scrutiny for misspending and abuse of power, and the U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating alleged civil rights abuses for three years. His chief deputy and several officials were dismissed or resigned amid allegations of abuse of power and yet, the sheriff goes on, bolstered by out-of-state campaign donations that almost guarantee he will be elected in 2012.

But things may change — the same group that managed to recall Russell Pearce, the once powerful senator who sponsored Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, now wants to recall Arpaio. And locals are predictably calling for his ouster in the national media frenzy over the old Arizona news of botched sex crime investigations.

If you want to see a video of me and Sheriff Joe, go to my  main page, and click on “videos and excerpts,” you can see a video of me and the sheriff.

Today the Associated Press reports that apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants at the border declined for the fifth straight year, and are at the same rate we saw during the Nixon administration.

In the meantime, the Obama Administration continues to deport at a record clip.

And Republicans are moderating their hardline stance on immigration reform.  Republicans are historically  the party that enacts immigration reform. The last big reform was led by Ronald Reagan.

Newt is talking about a kinder, gentler policy. And so are pundits like  Bill O’Reilly.

The Republicans have a chance of winning this election if they can win over Latinos, who are disenchanted with what they see as the the Obama administration’s broken promises to enact reform.

This all leads me back to my book, which chronicled the vivid stories — and the stunning effects of a broken immigration policy — of undocumented immigrants in the Phoenix area during the Arizona immigration law controversy. In the book, Illegal, Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone, I posited that the real problem wasn’t the right-wing frenzy over illegal immigration, because despite the heated rhetoric illegal immigration was waning significantly.

The real immigration problem centers on the unauthorized immigrants who live here  — and the  way in which our nation chooses to treat human beings.

The American Heritage dictionary recently came out with the John Tanton and Russell Pearce  definition of  “anchor baby.”

Read about this deeply-offensive-to-many dictionary definition in this Immigration Impact blog.

Then lets move on to video-enary definitions. The first, by Californians for Population Stabilization, affiliated with Dr. John Tanton. I think Tanton is the guy who walks in front of the camera on the first video. The second video, of O’Reilly and Russell Pearce, shows how closely affiliated Pearce is with Tanton’s thinking.

Russell Pearce, who sponsored Arizona’s immigration law after it was written by the legal arm of the Federation for Immigration Reform, which still hosts Tanton on its board, was recently recalled and is no longer in office in Arizona.

Drug money  laundered by the feds?  Is this a good idea?

Remember that the United States is the largest consumer of Mexican pot and cocaine in the world.

Then read this New York Times article.  It reports that federal agents laundered drug money in a drug war volley.

Then watch this video from the Washington Post.

The Mexican drug war is fueled by American consumption of Mexican drugs — Americans are stoners, one in five of us use pot, says New Yorker writer Steve Coll. Where does our pot come from? Mexico, mostly. Read Coll’s smart commentary here. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/mexico-drug-war.html

Washington state provides half of the nation’s apples. A worker shortage, attributed largely to immigration laws, coupled with a late harvest will probably make apples more costly this year. Here’s an explanation from the guys who grow our apples.

Come with me to meet Herman Cain,  who today will defend himself against allegations he sexually harassed four women.

It is a warm day in November, a beautiful day, high 60s.  Red petunias in the Scottsdale Plaza resort gardens open themselves to the sun. A fountain bubbles. Reporters with white HERMAN CAIN 2012 press credentials dangling around their necks race past the petunias into a conference room with a makeshift stage holding a podium with mics. Behind it are  four American flags.   TV guys wearing earphones stand like artillery men near their cameras. A phalanx of reporters with wired laptops sit in the back of the room, and about 20 reporters with notebooks and Twitter-ready iPhones sit on rows of chairs facing the stage. A dozen or so photographers sit on the floor, angling to get an unobstructed view. About 13 Cain staffers dressed in suits stand near the right hand side of the stage. Another staffer stands on the left side of the stage. Cain’s main press officer, J.D. Gordon, passes out his card to journalists. There are so many national  journos here. The networks, the wire services, the big newspapers.

Now  a young guy with a very serious expression and a bright orange necktie peers out at the reporters.

Meet Nathan.

He is Herman Cain’s assistant. When you see Nathan, you know Herman Cain is someplace close.

The last time I saw Nathan, he was shepherding Herman Cain to and from a press conference at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office. That was a month ago, in October.  There weren’t too many national reporters at that press conference. Back then, though, Herman Cain was at the top of his game. His poll numbers were soaring. He made a hollow apology about his ideas on an electric border fence, then allowed he’d still favor building it. He touted himself as a man who isn’t afraid to speak the truth, a good businessman with a solid plan (9-9-9) to get America out of its crisis.  As he raced off to a sold-out Republican fundraiser, I think he looked downright jubilant. Americans were finally taking him seriously.

What a difference a month makes.

Now Cain seems subdued.

Really subdued.

It had been well over a week since news reports detailed three cases of sexual harassment against Cain. They happened years before, but now that Cain was a presidential contender, the cases mattered.

Then a fourth accuser, Sharon Bialek, went public. She said Cain once groped at her genitals.

The New York Times broke the name of another accuser, Karen Kraushaar, who accused Cain of sexual harassment when he headed the National Restaurant Association. She got a small settlement.

Cain looks out at the reporters and the cameras click, click, click, click.

Sharon Bialek, he says, is a “troubled woman” trotted out by a Democratic machine to undo  him.

He doesn’t think he even recognizes her.

All the accusations against him are false and he “has never acted inappropriately.”

Click, click, click.

He’s been married to Gloria for 43 years and she told him on the phone, direct quote, that Sharon’s  accusation “doesn’t sound like something you would do.”

Then the questions come:

CBS News: Would you take a lie detector test?

Cain: Yes

ABC News: One accuser received money from the National Restaurant Association. Did she make up the allegations of sexual harrassment?

Cain: Her accusations were found to be baseless. She was paid money as part of an agreement when she left her job. She was not paid  a settlement. The word settlement has legal implications.

The Wall Street Journal: Four women have accused you of sexual harassment.  How do you explain this?

Cain: Look at where it is coming from. Where it is coming from is some people don’t want me to be president.  There will probably be others. Not because I’m aware of any, but because the Democratic machine will be relentless.

Fox News: Mitt Romney says the accusations are disturbing.

Cain: I agree, they are disturbing.

CNN: Are these all baseless accusations? Why?

Cain: I was only referring to the lady who filed the charge. (Karen.)

New York Times: Talk about Karen Kraushaar.

Cain: I remember standing next to her and saying you are the same height as my wife. The door was wide open. The secretary was sitting right there. That was what she was most upset about. She did not react at the time.

Click, click, click.

Then Cain says something about getting back on point. He’s the guy who can pull America out of its economic crisis.

And off he goes, accompanied by Nathan and the campaign team.

The reporters file stories on their laptops. Everyone starts packing up.

Outside, Karl and Kay Koller stand in the parking lot, trying to get a glimpse of Herman Cain.

They are “tea party types” in their 70s, and they drove 40 miles from their home in Surprise just  to see Herman Cain.

“We don’t know if we should support him,” says Karl.

And Kay says she thinks Sharon Bialek made up her story.

“We’re old now,” says Karl. “This is a new generation. Each generation has to figure things out for themselves.”

Here is the video.