With übertenther Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) emerging as the latest frontrunner in the Iowa GOP primary, Ta-Nehisi Coates chronicles many of the most offensive highlights from a series of racist newsletters Paul published in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

• Needlin’: Paul’s December 1989 newsletter claims that roving bands of African-Americans are trying to give white people HIV. According to the newsletter, “at least 39 white women have been stuck with used hypodermic needles-perhaps infected with AIDS-by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14. . . . Who can doubt that if the situation had been reversed, if white girls had done this to black women, we would have been subjected to months-long nation-wide propaganda campaign on the evils of white America? The double standard strikes again.”
• Fantasies of Anti-White Bias: The same newsletter imagined a fantasy world where anti-white racist dominates DC’s culture. “To be white in Washington, however, is to experience a culture that is anti-white and proud of it. Radio stations urge listeners not to shop in white (or Asian) owned stores. Ministers lead anti-white and anti-Asian boycotts. Professors teach that whites are committing genocide against blacks and invented crack and AIDS as part of The Plan.”
• Instructions on Murdering Black Youth: A 1992 newsletter provided fairly detailed instructions on the best way to shoot and kill an African-American and get away with it. “If you live in a major city, you’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. . . . An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example). I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.”
• Beware the “Malicious Gay”: African-Americans are not the only target of the newsletters’ ire. Ron Paul’s publications also feature unusually bad medical advice punctuated with anti-gay fantasies. “Those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get a blood transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay, as was Kimberly Bergalis.”

In a partial defense of Paul, David Weigel offers a perfectly plausible explanation of how these bigoted rants against science and reality came to appear under the name of a medical doctor who now argues that the War on Drugs should end because it is inherently racist. As Weigel explains in a piece he co-authored with Julian Sanchez, the likely author of Paul’s racist rants wasn’t Ron Paul, it was a repulsive libertarian activist named Lew Rockwell.

Rockwell, who now runs a far right think tank that publishes articles with titles like “How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare,” believed in the 1980s and 1990s that libertarians had become a “party of the stoned” that needed to be “de-loused.” His solution, according to Weigel and Sanchez, was to try to expand the libertarian tent to include overt racists who could be attracted to libertarians’ opposition to “State-enforced integration.” It was likely Rockwell, and not the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, who drafted the racist rants published in Paul’s name.

This explanation for Paul’s behavior hardly excuses it, however. The simplest conclusion that can be drawn when someone publishes a racist rant in their own name is that they truly believe that one race is superior to another. Weigel and Sanchez’ reporting, however, leads to only two possible explanations. Either Paul is so oblivious to what was being done in his name that this obliviousness alone disqualifies him for a job like the presidency — or he knew very well that horrific arguments were being published his name and he lent his name to a cynical racist strategy anyway.

Studies continue to show the important economic impact immigrants have on the national economy as well as states, be it the millions in losses Alabama faces after passing a draconian immigration law to the number of jobs immigrants help create.

Now venture capitalists are arguing for immigration reform for the sake of the economy after a study showed that immigrants founded almost half of the U.S.’s top 50 start-up companies and are vital management or development employees at roughly 75 percent of the nation’s leading cutting-edge companies.

Companies with immigrant founders include the textbook rental company Chegg and the online craft site Etsy. The most common countries of origin for these entrepreneurs were India, Israel, Canada, Iran, and New Zealand, and for many, their experiences creating a start-up were “uniquely American,” according to the report by the National Federation for American Policy:

The stories of how the companies were founded carry a uniquely American feel. In true “only in America” fashion, two former students at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran ended up in San Francisco and established an online romantic social network that is considered a top destination for singles. The men had to abandon another company they started years earlier after an immigration attorney informed the pair it was virtually impossible for a foreign national to gain a visa as the founder of a startup company. [...]

While it is often large companies that are cited in media accounts supporting liberalized immigration rules for highly-skilled foreign nationals, Eric Lekacz, a native-born co-founder of ExteNet Systems, which provides network infrastructure for wireless providers, points out that hiring the right person can be even more critical for newer companies. “When in the emerging growth phase you have to get the best person without regard to race or ethnicity,” he said.

The NFAP’s report concludes that the U.S. needs policies to retain talented entrepreneurs in the U.S., but the hoops can be high for those who want to immigrate to the U.S. And the cap for H-1B visas, highly sought after for IT workers, has already been reached for the 2012 fiscal year, so anyone who wants to apply for the visa will have to wait another year before trying. “It’s a gamble whether an entrepreneur should stay or leave right now, and that’s not how the immigration system should work,” said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, according to the Chicago Tribune. “What we need is legislation that helps these entrepreneurs from outside the United States.”

Our guest blogger is Ann Garcia, Research Assistant for Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund

While Newt Gingrich has tried hard to brand himself as moderate on immigration issues, the more details that emerge about his plan, the more his mask of compassion for undocumented immigrants living in our country peels off at the edges.

In late November, Gingrich famously broke ranks by saying that not all 11 million undocumented immigrants living in our nation should face deportation. Gingrich’s exceptionally modest proposal would grant residency permits without a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants who have been here for 25 years, have a U.S. citizen family member to sponsor them, can get approval from a McCarthyite “Citizen Review Board,” and can demonstrate income sufficient to pay private health insurance and a $5,000 fine.

In an interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Gingrich disclosed that only 2 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants would be eligible to attempt to jump through this grueling set of hoops:

SCHIEFFER: That’s the question I’m coming to. There are 11 million of these people. I mean, what are you going to do with them? You can’t build that many prisons to put them in. You can’t get that many buses to haul them back.

GINGRICH: Seven or eight or nine million would go home and get a guest worker permit and come back under the law. The last two million are people who have been here a very long time. They are really part of the community. They’re not citizens but they’re part of the community. The folks, you and I may well know some of these folks. And 25 years ago, they did something wrong but they’ve been very good neighbors. They belong to the local church. As I said one of the requirements would be they have to have an American family sponsor them to be eligible for review by the Citizen Review Board. I think it’s a responsible position that recognizes the humanity of the problem but firmly establishes the rule of law.

Watch it:

The truth of the matter is that very little daylight exists between the proposals of Newt Gingrich and his GOP primary opponents who propose the deportation of all 11 million. The leading GOP presidential candidates, including Gingrich, continue to kowtow to a small minority of Republican voters who believe American taxpayers should foot the $200 billion it would cost to deport 8.64 million undocumented immigrants.

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

TODD: Do you think Citizens United was a bad decision? [...]

ROMNEY:Well,I think the Supreme Court decision was following their interpretation of the campaign finance laws that were written by Congress. My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately and the creation of these independent expenditure committees that have to be separate from the candidate, that’s just a bad idea.

Watch it:

It’s not entirely clear from this interview that Romney understands what happened in Citizens United. That decision emphatically did not follow any “interpretation of campaign finance laws that were written by Congress.” Rather, Citizens United threw out a 63 year-old federal ban on corporate money in politics. Citizens United was a case of five conservative justices deciding they knew better than America’s democratically elected representatives, and it was not a case of judges following the law.

More importantly, however, Romney’s proposal to allow wealthy donors to give candidates whatever they’d “like to a campaign” is simply an invitation to corruption. Under Romney’s proposed rule, there is nothing preventing a single billionaire from bankrolling a candidate’s entire campaign — and then expecting that candidate to do whatever the wealthy donor wants once the candidate is elected to office. Romney’s unlimited donations proposal would be a bonanza for Romney himself and the army of Wall Street bankers and billionaire donors who support him, but it is very difficult to distinguish it from legalized bribery.

As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that [those candidates are] going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.

After conducting a two-year investigation, the Department of Justice released a report slamming the East Haven Police Department (EHPD) in Connecticut for pervasive discrimination against Latinos in violation of the Constitution and federal law. In a letter to East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. (R), DOJ Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez noted that not only did the EHPD consistently engage in discriminatory traffic enforcement, “treating Latino drivers more harshly than non-Latino drivers after a traffic stop,” but that it conducted “unauthorized immigration investigations” of Latinos, reflecting a discrimination that is “deeply rooted in the Department’s culture”:

The letter described the discrimination as “deeply rooted in the Department’s culture,” and cited a statistical analysis showing how Latinos were “intentionally targeted” for traffic stops. It provided the example of a particular officer’s stops — 40.5% of which were of Latino drivers.

Overall, the investigation found that 19.9% of traffic stops made by the EHPD were of Latino drivers, concluding it “shows pervasive discrimination against Latinos on every level of EHPD traffic enforcement activity.” The report also said officers were able to target Latinos by focusing on customers leaving Latino businesses.

In addition to the high rate of traffic stops, the report accused some EHPD officers of conducting unauthorized immigration investigations. The report mentioned “numerous incident reports” where EHPD officers contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check on the status or seek an immigration detention of a Latino person. Investigators said the tactic was “used to harass and intimidate Latinos rather than pursue legitimate law enforcement objectives.”

East Haven is 88.5 percent white, and only 10.3 percent Hispanic or Latino, so Latino drivers are twice as likely to be pulled over than their share of the population would suggest.

The report also accused the EHPD leadership of obstructing the investigation by “creating a hostile and intimidating environment” for those willing to cooperate. The EHPD did not comment on the report. The DOJ intends to meet with community leaders but said it “may suspend or terminate federal funding if the town fails to address the civil rights violations.”