GOP recruiter DeeDee Blase was having trouble wooing Arizona Latinos so she started her own group, “Somos Republicans,” which disassociates itself from the local and state Republican Party in an effort to register more Latinos under the Party’s national banner. Blase points out that Arizona Latinos have become dissatisfied with local GOP leaders like Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who’s regularly accused of racial profiling — and state Sen. Russell Pearce — who called for the revival of “Operation Wetback,” a pre-civil rights federal program aimed at the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Somos Republicans leverages Latino anger against local anti-immigrant GOP leaders and exploits disappointment in President Obama, who has yet to deliver on his promise of comprehensive immigration reform.

Blase says she was motivated to start Somos Republicans because “Obama sold Latinos down the river” by not tackling comprehensive immigration reform during his first year as president. Its website cites “humane immigration reform focusing on legalizing labor” as a “Republican value.” However, Somos Republicans ignores the fact that Arizona GOP leaders aren’t the only Republican politicians touting hardline immigration policies. In fact, the Republican National Committee’s 2008 party platform offered nothing but enforcement-only solutions to the country’s broken immigration system and outright opposed “amnesty.” Meanwhile, right-wing Republicans did everything in their power to block comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 and 2007, and they’re likely to spend most of the upcoming immigration battle kicking and screaming. One could also say they’re also at least partly to blame for the overall delay of President Obama’s legislative agenda given all the stunts Republican right-wingers have pulled to intentionally stall health care reform.

From Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-NC) to former anti-immigrant hate group lobbyist Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) , the Republican party has repeatedly legitimized — if not elevated — its anti-immigrant fringe. Many of the GOP’s immigrant-haters sit on the House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC), a group of (mostly Republican) representatives founded by former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) with the mission of stopping “the explosive growth in illegal immigration,” “reversing the growth in legal immigration,” and halting “amnesties.” Other notoriously anti-immigrant members of HIRC include Steve King (R-IA), who described immigration as a “slow-motion Holocaust,” and Lamar Smith (R-TX), who equates undocumented immigrants with “terrorist weapons.” Several HIRC members have publicly supported Arapio and have held his immigration enforcement tactics up as a model for their own communities.

Meanwhile, the GOP is quickly losing the few Latino leaders it once had. Ex-chairman of the Rhode Island Republican Hispanic Assembly Ivan Marte quit the GOP after Joe Wilson’s anti-immigrant outburst and advised Republicans to “reevaluate their position” on reaching out to minority groups. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who recently resigned, expressed similar frustrations. Former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Jim Nicholson has urged Republicans to “review” their position on immigration and Colin Powell has pointed out that the “policies with which we greet them [immigrants] are, in important ways, self-fulfilling.”

Of course not all Republicans are racist, and not everyone who opposes immigration is a nativist. However, misrepresenting the Party’s platform and presenting the GOP as something it’s not is shamefully disingenuous. It also fails to fundamentally address the xenophobia which plagues and divides the GOP and may one day render the Republican Party obsolete if left undenounced and untethered.

A couple stories this morning — one predictable, the other quite surprising — could push the Iran policy debate in two very different directions.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, “U.S. spy agencies are considering whether to rewrite a controversial 2007 intelligence report that asserted Tehran halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003.”

The intelligence agencies’ rethink comes as pressure is mounting on Capitol Hill, and among U.S. allies, for the Obama administration to redo the 2007 assessment, after a string of recent revelations about Tehran’s nuclear program. [...]

So far, intelligence officials are not “ready to declare [the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate] invalid,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said, emphasizing that the judgment covered the 2003-2007 time frame only. That leaves room for a reassessment of the period since the December 2007 report was completed, the official suggested.

There have been rumors about this for a while. The revelation of the Qom facility, as well as the alleged so-called IAEA “secret annex” — which is said to claim that “Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and worked on developing a missile system that can carry an atomic warhead” — have put a lot of pressure on the intelligence community to take another look at Iran’s potential weapons program.

Even if it is determined that the Iranians have restarted weapons design work, however, it’s important to stress that there is still no evidence — and no, John Bolton’s op-eds don’t count as evidence — that Iran has decided to obtain a nuclear weapon, as opposed to breakout capacity. This is an extremely important distinction, one that Iran war advocates have consistently attempted to elide.

But it may not matter: Today David Ignatius notes a recent article in Nucleonics Week which “reported that Iran’s supply of low-enriched uranium — the potential feedstock for nuclear bombs — appears to have certain ‘impurities’ that ‘could cause centrifuges to fail’ if the Iranians try to boost it to weapons grade.”

This news strikes me as a potential bombshell. If the Nucleonics Week report is accurate (and there’s some uncertainty among experts about how serious the contamination problem is), the Iranian nuclear program is in much worse shape than most analysts had realized. The contaminated fuel it has produced so far would be all but useless for nuclear weapons. To make enough fuel for a bomb, Iran might have to start over — this time avoiding the impurities.

In his book The Inheritance, David Sanger goes into some detail on the extent to which U.S. intelligence had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear supply chain, feeding faulty equipment, technology and material to the program in order to hold back its development. It’s unclear yet whether that has anything to do with the uranium contamination, but if the problem is as extensive as Ignatius reports it could prove to be as much of a game-changer as the 2007 NIE was.

Lately, Karl Rove has taken up the cause of defending the Bush administration’s record on Afghanistan. His main strategy thus far — understandably, given the near-universal acknowledgment that the current crisis in Afghanistan is the direct result of the choice to invade Iraq — is to just make stuff up.

Yesterday, Amanda noted that Rove had insisted that U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were never denied needed troops or resources, a statement contradicted by the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan.

A few weeks ago, he told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren that the reason Afghanistan is in such bad shape is — I kid you not — because the surge worked. Enough said.

On Van Susteren’s show again last night, though, Rove responded to criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of Afghanistan this way:

ROVE: Well, look, this is — this is — this is the sort of way that we revise history. The current occupant of the White House wants to basically say, Look, they under-sourced — under-resourced Afghanistan, and that’s simply not true. [...]

Our real problem in this region emerged in the last couple of years, when our relationships with Pakistan and events inside of Pakistan — events first inside of Pakistan, and then the first part of this year, the relationship with Pakistan — allowed, you know, the conditions for the Taliban to regroup inside Pakistan and for the Taliban affiliates inside Pakistan to begin to threaten the central government.

It’s not just the current occupant of the White House who says we under-resourced Afghanistan, but also the current Chairman of the Join Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee in September that the U.S. had “very badly under-resourced Afghanistan for the better part of five years.” As an international aid worker in Afghanistan told the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins, “the tragedy” is that “the $70 billion that would have given you enough police and army to stabilize this place all went to Iraq.”

As for Rove’s attempt to blame “our relationships with Pakistan and events inside of Pakistan” for the deterioration of Afghanistan, it’s unclear why he thinks this is remotely exculpatory of the Bush administration. It was Bush who placed — misplaced, it turned out — an enormous amount of trust in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and who continued to back him long after it had become clear that the authoritarian Musharraf was a far less than dependable ally against extremism.

It hardly needs saying that it’s Rove who is trying to revise history here. Let’s review: It was George W. Bush who allowed Osama bin Laden and the senior Al Qaeda leadership to escape from Tora Bora and set up shop in Pakistan. It was George W. Bush who chose to divert resources and attention from an unfinished war in Afghanistan to start a staggeringly wasteful and counterproductive war in Iraq. And it was George W. Bush who clung to Musharraf until the last moment. It’s perfectly understandable that Republican spinmeisters, especially one so legacy-obsessed as Rove, are now trying to lay Bush’s messes at the feet of the man hired to clean them up, but the reality is that Afghanistan was the key national security challenge of the Bush presidency — and the Bush administration utterly botched it.