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Politics

Congressional Campaign Behind Letter Telling Immigrants They Will Be Deported If They Vote

maldefletter1.gif Approximately 14,000 Hispanic Democratic voters in Orange County, CA recently received a Spanish-language letter warning them to stay away from the polls:

Be advised that if your residence in the United States is illegal or if you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in incarceration, and possible deportation for voting without the right to do so. …

Not like in Mexico, here there is no benefit to voting. In the United States there is no registration card to vote. Therefore, it is useless and dangerous to vote in any election if you are not a citizen of the United States.

Do not pay attention to a politician who may try to tell you otherwise. They only care about their own interests.

This letter is a deceptive ploy to suppress Hispanic voter turn-out. Immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens can legally vote. The letter has now been traced back to the campaign of Tan D. Nguyen, a Republican challenger to Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA).

Twenty-two organizations have written to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requesting an investigation into the Orange County voter suppression. California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has ordered an investigation into the mailing, which may have violated the Voting Rights Act. Read House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) statement HERE.

UPDATE: MSNBC Breaking News is reporting that “Calif. GOP leaders want candidate to drop out after threat to Hispanic voters.”

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Media

O’Reilly on Blogosphere: ‘I’d Go in With A Hand Grenade’

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, political strategist Larry Sabato bemoaned the “blogs on left and right” and “the things they come up with daily, the vitriol, the vile nature of the comments.”

O’Reilly said that he knew “for a fact that President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on in the Internet.” O’Reilly then said, “I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I’d go in with a hand grenade.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/10/oreillygrenade.320.240.flv]

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Transcript: Read more

Security

POLL: Two-Thirds of Americans Believe There’s A Civil War In Iraq

A poll released by the Wall Street Journal this morning found that 66 percent of Americans believe there is a civil war in Iraq. Here is the question and the results:

civil war poll

In other words, 40 percent of Americans believe that violence in Iraq should be described as “Iraqis fighting against each other in a civil war.” Another 26 percent think there is a civil war in addition to an anti-U.S. insurgency. (ThinkProgress noted yesterday there are actually at least four different violent conflicts ongoing in Iraq.) Therefore, fully 2/3 of Americans believe there is a civil war in Iraq.

Conservative pollster Bill McInturff noted “If Americans continue to see U.S. troops caught in the middle of a civil war…that will ratchet up the pressure to terminate our deployment in Iraq.’”

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Politics

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)

is the House’s top recipient of lobbyist donations. According to Public Citizen, “Lewis raked in more than $700,000 from lobbyists between January 1999 and December 2005.” Among senators, Banking Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-AL) was ranked the top recipient of lobbyist contributions.

Politics

ThinkFast: October 19, 2006

Evangelical Christian leaders are tackling a growing list of domestic and international issues, such as genocide in Darfur and global warming.” Today, a “broad coalition of evangelical leaders will begin airing advertisements on Christian radio stations calling for action to address climate change.”

October is on track to be the third-deadliest month of the war, despite the fact that the “military has not conducted any major operations.” The two months with higher casualty rates — Apr. 2004 and Nov. 2004 — “were marked by full-scale offensives in Falluja and Najaf.”

Addressing Bush’s false claim that detainees will be able to “hear all the evidence against them,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann said last night, “The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense. Your words are lies, Sir. They are lies, that imperil us all.”

A National Research Council study reports a “demonstrably downward” trend in the population of birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life. The trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, scientists warned, because three-fourths of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization.

Staff on the House Veterans Affairs Committee report that the “number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have sought help for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) doubled — from nearly 4,500 to more than 9,000 — from October 2005 through June 2006.” Read more

Politics

The Annals of Obviousness

Probably time to stop blogging for a few hours and work on something else, but The New York Times has a can’t-miss scoop — apparently some women use Halloween as an opportunity to wear risqué outfits. I’m thinking of pitching them a feature about how for a lot of kids these days Christmas is more about the presents than about the Jesus.

Yglesias

Networking (in a good way)

Finally, a network for security progressives — the National Security Network — is up and running. It seeks to bridge the divide between the foreign policy experts and politicians in Washington aka “wonks” and local community leaders and the general public. An affiliated organization provides a communications hub where you can sign up and discuss ideas.

Good stuff. My sadly neglected March 2005 masterpiece “Disconnected” was largely about the need for more such bridge-building institutions to create a progressive movement capable of doing the politics of national security in, to use some military jargon, a full-spectrum manner featuring copious quantities of jointness. Relatedly, it’s good to see that the New America Foundation has recently hosted a couple of events — including one going down this afternoon — seeking to foster some constructive debate among progressives as to what our general foreign policy orientation should be.

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