Our guest blogger is Kera Bartlett, an intern with Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities at the Center for American Progress. Kera is a recent graduate of the Diplomacy and World Affairs program at Occidental College.

As Congress fights against the President and Defense Department to fund additional F-22 fighters, a reopened lawsuit alleges that producer Lockheed Martin has knowingly supplied defective F-22 Raptors to the U.S. Air Force since 1995.

The pending lawsuit, filed by Lockheed-trained stealth expert Darrol Olsen, accuses Lockheed of knowingly using defective coatings for the F-22 in the mid-1990s. To cover up the problem, engineers applied 600 lbs worth of extra layers, stressing the airframe and compromising its stealth capabilities.

Olsen further alleges that low-quality stealth coatings have not only worsened the radar and infrared visibility of the F-22, but that they have been a factor in dangerous and expensive accidents — as when a section of coating broke off and was sucked into an F-22 engine last year, causing over $1 million in damage.

While Olsen was fired for “failure to follow instructions” in 1999, his suit goes on to say that third-party reports indicate that the Raptor’s stealth protection “has not been remedied through the present date.”

So not only is Lockheed Martin getting $354 million of tax payer dollars per F-22, but they are defective and dangerous. A Washington Post article this morning also revealed that the F-22 can only be flown an average of 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure. Maybe it’s better that we haven’t had to use them in real combat yet.

Shouldn’t we focus on making the producers fix the fighter jets we’ve already ordered before we give this weapons juggernaut more tax payer dollars to produce faulty jets?

Just last month, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders emerged from a White House meeting pledging to work together on reforming the nation’s immigration laws with one broad piece of legislation that would fix the broken immigration system once and for all. The meeting’s attendees seemed to agree that a “piecemeal” approach would be counterproductive and inefficient.

However, that didn’t stop a group of right-wing GOP lawmakers from continuing on what seems like a never-ending crusade to derail comprehensive immigration reform. Their latest attack came this week when Republican senators swamped the Department of Homeland Security $42.9 billion appropriations bill with a series of immigration enforcement-only amendments before comprehensive immigration reform could even hit the Senate floor. The bill passed yesterday evening, 84-6.

– Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) sponsored an amendment that would require 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border to be completed by the end of 2012. Concerns expressed by environmentalists and social activists that the border fence will unfairly target low-income landowners and harm the environment were brushed aside. The legislation passed Wednesday by a vote of 54-44, essentially bucking the Obama administration’s plans to cut border fence funds.

– Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) offered a separate amendment that would overturn DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s decision to rescind the Bush Administration’s troubling practice of sending Social Security “no-match” letters to employers with employees whose numbers don’t match the federal database. Labor unions claim the letters have been used by employers to threaten their workers and the ACLU has often pointed out that the system uses “notoriously incomplete and inaccurate Social Security databases to decide who is authorized to work.” The legislation passed yesterday morning.

– Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) proposed an amendment that would make E-verify, an error-ridden online verification program, mandatory and permanent. The amendment passed by voice vote on Wednesday, and Sen Check Schumer’s (D-NY) effort to table it was dismissed yesterday, 44-53.

– Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also introduced an amendment that would allow employers to use E-verify to confirm the status of all their workers, not just the new hires that previous decisions had applied to. That wouldn’t be such a big problem if it weren’t for the possibility that E-verify’s error-rate could potentially lead to the accidental unemployment of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the midst of a recession. The amendment passed by voice vote last night.

While anti-immigrant groups are already toasting to the imminent failure of comprehensive immigration reform, immigration advocates remained calm and described this week’s actions as a “detour” and “political theater” that should be “taken with a grain of salt.” Either way, there’s an undeniable steep learning curve for conservative lawmakers who are slow to realize that they can no longer rely on an enforcement-only approach to immigration when the majority of their frustrated constituents want immigration laws overhauled inside and out. E-verify, no-match letters, and 700 miles of border fencing aren’t going to fix the immigration system. If anything, they further emphasize how broken it is.

Every week for the last several years, Palestinians from the village of Bilin, accompanied by Israeli and international supporters, have turned out to non-violently protest the Israeli separation barrier that has been built on their land. As with many other areas along the barrier’s path, the barrier in Bilin imposes enormous hardships upon Palestinian residents, separating them from some 60 percent of their farming land in order to create a perimeter around the nearby Israeli settlement of Modiin Illit.

Yesterday, Fox News reporter Reena Ninan was gassed by Israeli troops, along with the rest of the demonstrators.

Watch it:

Despite Fox anchor Megyn Kelly’s apparent amazement that there is, like, totally an occupation going on here, such brutal encounters with the Israeli military are a daily fact of Palestinian life.

Bilin resident Iyad Burnat is a Palestinian activist and founder of the Friends of Freedom and Justice in Bilin. Reached by phone, Burnat described the scene at the protest: “When we got there today, the Israelis just started shooting tear gas. Why are they shooting at non-violent demonstrators? We are people with our hands up, we are protesting the confiscation of our land.” Burnat said that the barrier “is not a security wall, this is just to confiscate more land, and build more settlements on our land.”

Burnat described the frequent Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) incursions into Bilin, saying that “every night we have the IDF invading the village, searching the houses, arresting people from Bilin. Why? Because we say to all the world that this is our land. The soldiers come in the middle of the night, shooting into the houses, where our children are sleeping.”

Burnat’s claims are borne out by video footage on this Bilin website, as well as by reporting done for Mondoweiss, which has previously covered the IDF’s late-night incursions into Bilin.

In April, 30-year-old Bassem Ibrahim Abu-Rahma was killed while protesting the Bilin barrier when a tear gas canister fired by the IDF struck him in the chest.

While there is a legitimate security justification for the barrier, there is no justification for building it on Palestinian land, other than as a mechanism for appropriating it. In a 2005 ruling, the International Court of Justice found that “the construction of the wall and its associated regime create a ‘fait accompli’ on the ground that could well become permanent, in which case, . . . [the construction of the wall] would be tantamount to de facto annexation” of Palestinian land.

In 2007, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the government to reroute the wall near Bilin because the current route was “highly prejudicial” to the villagers and not justifiable on security grounds. In 2008, the Israeli court again rejected the placement of the wall and said it must be rerouted “as soon as possible.”

Follow Bilin on Twitter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit that tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, sent a letter to congressional leaders today revealing the “threat posed by racial extremists who may be serving in the military”:

Evidence continues to mount that current Pentagon policies are inadequate to prevent racial extremists from joining and serving in the armed forces. In recent months, we have found dozens of personal profiles listing “military” as an occupation on a neo-Nazi website. Because the presence of extremists in the armed forces is a serious threat to the safety of the American public, we believe Congressional action is warranted.

Approximately 40 profiles on newsaxon.org — “a racist version of Facebook run by the National Socialist Movement” — show a disturbing number of Nazi and Confederate flags, white supremacist language, and identification as active duty members of the U.S. military. One hundred thirty members out of a total 7,906 users list their job as “military.” Member “geisler,” for example, identifies himself as a “human resources specialist” in the Army and says he wants to “find a woman I can settle down with and have a nice, WHITE family (unlike some in the army with all the race traitors).” Among his hobbies is “to further the preservation and existence of our race”:

The problem of white supremacists in the military started gaining attention a few years ago, when recruiting shortfalls caused by the Iraq war allowed “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” to sign up. A Defense Department investigator admitted, “We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That’s a problem.” Similarly, in 2008, the FBI issued this report:

Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as “ghost skins,” in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.

The Bush administration ignored the problem. The SPLC called on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to study the issue and more strictly enforce zero-tolerance. Under Secretary David Chu refused to take action, saying that the military was already doing enough. But in a 2005 report for the Defense Department, investigators found that officials were basically turning a blind eye to the problem:

Additionally, as seen in Appendix A, the relatively larger number of message board postings warning new recruits from revealing their extremist group associations exemplifies the presence of both military policy and action to disallow such activities in the Armed Forces. Effectively, the military has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt through words or actions that violate policy, reflect poorly on the Armed Forces, or disrupt the effectiveness and order of their units, they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.

Of course, the right wing was apoplectic over the recent Department of Homeland Security report that warned extremists may “attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans.” This doesn’t mean that all members of the military are racist or likely to sign up with extremist groups. But with more than 12,500 valuable service members discharged since 1994 for nothing more than their sexual orientation, it seems that the military is kicking out the wrong people.

Our guest blogger is Michael Signer, the author of Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies. Signer was recently a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia.

The neocons are rising, zombie-like, from the grave American voters dug for them in the last election. Untroubled by regret, much less shame, they’re already whetting their knives for the Obama administration, exploiting challenging events abroad — whether in Iran or Honduras — to rewrite their own history, on the one hand, and start to write Barack Obama’s, on the other.

At the moment, it’s about freedom and the right role for democracy in Obama’s foreign policy — fitting, given that democracy became the ostensible purpose of America’s foreign policy after President Bush’s second inaugural address in January 2005, when he said that “the calling of our time” was “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Against such a bracing call, neocons are already attacking Obama for failing to live up to Bush’s dreams. Witness the intellectual spasm this week by Jonah Goldberg in USA Today. Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism (a sales target-title in search of a nonfiction book, if ever there was one) argued that President Barack Obama has abandoned democracy promotion as “ideology,” for the sake of a purportedly undemocratic “pragmatism.”

Goldberg attacks Obama for a “cynical” policy in Iran and, in Honduras, for having “no problem with meddling when a left-wing agenda is advanced,” and concludes, “It sure seems like Obama has an ideological problem with democracy.”

It’s understandable that the neocons are confused. Like the Neanderthals wandering a human world in Jean Auel’s novels, they’re dangerously out of date. What Goldberg doesn’t understand is that a new, more modern goal underlies Obama’s more sophisticated effort to achieve democracy around the world –constitutionalism. Read more