Texas has the largest uninsured population and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) decided to pin the blame on undocumented immigrants at a Dallas press conference this past Friday. “We have the highest number of uninsured. Mostly because of the illegal immigrant population,” said Hutchison.

However, state hospital officials were quick to point out that Hutchison is wrong. Ann Ward, Vice President with the Texas Hospital Association, points out:

“People say illegal immigrants are a large part of the uninsured population but the studies I’ve seen by the Texas Department of Insurance, it’s less than 20 percent of uninsured are illegal immigrants. And one thing we know, many of the people who come to hospitals for care. They pay, they pay cash.”

Ward explains that Texas has the highest rate of uninsured because of the large number of low-wage workers who cannot afford private insurance and the small business which do not offer their employees health care benefits. Another national study shows that U.S. citizens make up the majority of the nonelderly uninsured (78%), while legal and undocumented immigrants account for only 22%.

Listen here:

An employee of the Department of Homeland Security, Jimmy Slaughter, is suing his own agency for accidentally raiding his home this past Spring in search of an undocumented immigrant who didn’t live there. Slaughter’s lawyer claims that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents entered his house without a search warrant or probable cause. ICE authorities were looking for an immigrant woman whose mail had been incorrectly sent to the Slaughters’ residence. In an affidavit attached to the lawsuit Slaughter said:

“Is this the agency which protects our country? . . . Now my neighbors are wondering or believe I am just another ‘DIRTY COP!’ I have served my country proudly for 23 years in the Marine Corps and six years as a Customs K-9 handler. I bleed Red, White and Blue.”

Slaughter’s case was one of the many highlighted in a recent report released by the Cardozo School of Law which claims that federal immigration agents have violated their own agency rules as well as the Constitution while conducting home immigration raids. The report accused ICE agents of approaching their work with a “cowboy mentality” which has lead to severe misconduct and disregard for the rule of law. In the report Slaughter explains what happened:

“I was at home with my wife when the door bell rang. I opened the door and noticed approximately 7 uniformed ICE agents with vests and guns standing at my door . . . I opened the door to look at the paperwork and five agents entered my house . . . . The agents then told my wife to stand in the center of ‘OUR’ living room. Not once did anyone say they had a warrant.”

Not only are ICE officials mistakenly raiding the homes of their colleagues, this weekend the San Francisco Chronicle also documented several recent instances in which US citizens have been accidentally detained and deported.

Last week, responding to international criticism of Israeli plans to build new Jewish homes in an Arab neighborhood of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman “ordered embassies abroad to use a photo of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric.”

The decision to circulate a 1941 photo featuring the Nazi dictator sitting with the then grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini is aimed at easing pressure on Israel over a construction project on land in annexed east Jerusalem once owned by the cleric, [an Israeli] official told AFP.

Appointed “grand mufti” in 1921 by the British mandate authorities as a means to dividing and controlling competing Palestinian factions (the title and position itself was a British creation), Husseini eventually fled Palestine and attempted to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. Husseini hoped that, by collaborating with the enemy of the British, who he believed were facilitating the takeover of Palestine by Zionist settlers, he might be able both to prevent the creation of a Jewish state and establish himself as a regional power.

There is little doubt that Husseini had extreme, racist views of Jews, and that he gave support to the Nazis in hopes of gaining advantage against the British and Zionist forces in Palestine. What this specifically has to do with Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem, however, is less clear.

Doing his part to push the Israeli line, yesterday Alan Dershowitz took it even further. In his Jerusalem Post column — which, in a bit of unintentional irony, is called “Double Standard Watch” — Dershowitz questioned whether the Palestinian people, collectively, bore any responsibility for the Holocaust. “The truth,” wrote Dershowitz, “is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust.”

This claim is preposterous. And, needless to say, Dershowitz utterly fails to prove it, managing only to establish the already known facts that a Palestinian leader, Husseini, had a relationship with the Nazis, and that many Palestinians still consider Husseini something of a nationalist hero. The idea that Husseini, let alone the Palestinians as a whole, played a “significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust” is laughable, as if the Nazis required one of the sub-human races to sign off on their plans for mass murder.

This is obviously not scholarship, but nor is it simply polemic. It is the attempted slander of the Palestinian people, in order to diminish their historical claim to a state with Jerusalem as its capital. In his Cairo speech, President Obama importantly recognized this claim as being co-equal with Israel’s, and admirably rejected the childishly one-sided narrative of the conflict that Dershowitz is peddling.

It’s important not to lose sight of what’s really at issue here. Lieberman’s order to push the Husseini photo and its attendant anti-Palestinian propaganda is aimed at deflecting attention away from Israel’s extremely provocative efforts to thicken the Jewish presence in occupied areas of Jerusalem. These efforts inflict an enormous cost on Jerusalem’s Arab inhabitants, who are prohibited from expanding their homes and neighborhoods, even as Jewish residents are encouraged to — and aided in it by the Israeli government and private American donors.

This is the real double standard, Mr. Dershowitz. Look into it.

In an interview with Jorge Ramos on Univision’s “Al Punto,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blamed Spanish-language attack ads, which he claims portrayed him as anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, and anti-immigration reform, for costing him the Latino vote in last year’s elections:

RAMOS: Are Republicans concerned about upsetting their base if they vote to legalize undocumented immigrants?

MCCAIN: I don’t know…uh…I can’t speak for all Republicans…I know I was out there twice — on the floor of the Senate with Senator Kennedy — trying to pass comprehensive immigration with a path to legalization on it and I was attacked during the campaign for being anti-immigrant. Life isn’t fair.

RAMOS: Talking specifically about that — the last time we spoke was during the campaign. And you know and I know that you only got 31% of the Hispanic vote. Are you disappointed? What went wrong?

MCCAIN: Obviously I’m very disappointed. Millions of dollars of attack ads on your network and across the country in Spanish-language stations attacked me for being anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, and anti-immigration reform. They succeeded.

Watch it:

In 2006, McCain voted for Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) amendment to “declare English as the national language.” It seems McCain has consistently failed to note that many Latinos have mastered both English and Spanish. The 69% of Latino voters who voted against McCain probably didn’t have to look much farther than his own conflicting statements on immigration policy. It’s true that McCain fought and lost the battle for comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. Yet, less than one year later he stated that he wouldn’t support his own bill during a Republican presidential primary debate. Later on, his party adopted an “uncompromising anti-immigrant agenda” as part of the GOP platform.

Meanwhile, McCain sang a much different tune in the ethnic media. He launched a Spanish-language ad campaign blaming Obama and Senate Democrats for intentionally killing immigration reform with what he called “poison pill amendments.” Maybe McCain forgot that the same day the bill died, he came out blaming opposition within his own party, saying “A lot of the Republican base was passionate about the issue, and they made their influence felt.” The Obama camp responded by airing its “dos caras” ad, which portrayed McCain as two-faced on immigration. In another campaign ad, McCain translated “pro-innovation immigration policies” in English to “immigration policy innovation” in Spanish captions, essentially conveying two different messages to anyone who understands both.

When Ramos asked McCain if he thinks immigration reform is possible this year, McCain responded that he “didn’t know,” but that he will not support any legislation that does not contain a legal guest worker program.