Following his victory in the Republican primary for Florida governor, Latino GOP strategists began urging Rick Scott (R-FL) to consider a Latino from South Florida as his running mate “to broaden his appeal and diffuse the immigration issue.” However, last week, Scott tapped Jennifer Carroll (R-FL), an African American immigrant from Trinidad, to share the Republican ticket with him as lieutenant governor. “Working together, we will broaden the base of our party,” Scott said as he introduced Carroll.

However, if Scott hopes to use Carroll to broaden a minority base that includes disgruntled Latino and immigrant voters who he has isolated via his hardline immigration stance, he may want to ask his running mate to brush up on her talking points. The Palm Beach Post published an awkward exchange between one of its reporters and Carroll in which she admitted that she hasn’t read the Arizona copy cat bill sponsored by Florida state Rep. Will Snyder (R). In fact, rather than answering a question regarding Arizona’s immigration law, Carroll asked the reporter to state her opinion. According to Carroll, she and Scott simply haven’t “gotten into the nitpicky as to how a bill is going to be crafted.”

Watch it:

In a separate interview, Carroll asserted that she supports Scott’s hard-line views on illegal immigration and his promise to enact a state law similar to Arizona’s:

“The bottom line is legal immigration. We cannot reward people for their illegal acts in coming to this country,” Carroll said. Even for legal immigrants like herself, she said, the process is “cumbersome, tedious and not friendly,” adding: “One thing we have to get away from is the race factor, because immigrants come from different backgrounds, like myself, from Trinidad. Not always Mexican.”

During his primary against Bob McCollum (R-FL), Scott poured millions of dollars into ads supporting Arizona’s tough immigration law and advocating for one like it in Florida. Snyder’s immigration bill, which McCollum unveiled as part of his campaign platform, was largely a desperate response to Scott’s pandering on the issue. Since then, GOP Latino leaders have been publicly asking Scott to abandon his anti-immigrant rhetoric. So far, there is no indication that either he or his running mate is listening.

Yesterday, Think Progress reported on Gen. David Petraeus’ comments that the “International Burn a Quran Day” being planned by the right-wing Dove World Church in Florida “could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort” in Afghanistan. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gen. Petraeus also said that the Quran burning “is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here [in Afghanistan], but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

As if to underline Petreaus’ point, “hundreds of Afghans railed against the United States and called for President Barack Obama’s death at a rally” in Kabul earlier today protesting the planned Quran burning.

In an interview with MSNBC, Dove World Church Pastor Terry Jones described his motivation for burning Islam’s sacred text: “We do not want sharia law or sharia courts” in the United States, he said.

Now, obviously the idea that the U.S. is in danger of coming under sharia law, and its citizens subject to sharia courts, is loony. But understand that this loony belief doesn’t come out of nowhere — it’s exactly what conservative elites have been telling their base for years. Whether it’s Newt Gingrich cribbing Andrew McCarthy’s doctored anecdotes about “creeping sharia,” or the Washington Times running endless editorials and op-eds from utterly dishonest people like Frank Gaffney warning of same, or Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney claiming, without any evidence, that Cordoba Initiative leader Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has “terror-related connections,” it’s clear that there’s a well-funded and organized network of conservatives who see political profit in stoking Americans’ fear of Islam. And Americans are responding to that, some of them in extreme fashion, such as the Quran burners.

The question is what responsibility these elites have for their Islam-bashing endangering U.S. troops in the field. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, I think we need to be careful about chilling speech by arguing that this or that “helps our enemies.” I’m also uncomfortable with empowering popular military officers, no matter how beatified by the media, as arbiters of what is and is not appropriate speech. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider the effects of such speech, or more broadly how the tenor of these debates affects America’s influence abroad. We should. And we should also force conservative elites to acknowledge the consequences of their cynical fearmongering.

Last night, Fox News’ John Stossel featured Reason TV’s Nick Gillepsie and Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce (R-AZ) — the sponsor of SB-1070. Throughout the segment, Gillepsie repeatedly pointed out that, as illegal immigration has risen in Arizona, crime has gone down. However, Pearce refused to accept the data that Gillepsie was providing, arguing that “what’s coming across the border today is the drug trafficking, the human smugglers, the child molesters, the gang members”:

STOSSEL: Russell, he says crime is down, and that’s my understanding. We have a graph of crime in border states.

PEARCE: Violence isn’t down in those areas where the illegal aliens are involved in crime.

GILLEPSIE: Every study that compares a border city to a similar non-border city finds that the border cities are less violent, they’re less crime-ridden. Places like El Paso.

PEARCE: You can ignore the damage. That’s not true! Twenty percent coming across the border already have a criminal history. Twenty percent! What’s coming across the border today is the drug trafficking, the human smugglers, the child molesters, the gang members. And you ignore all that!

GILLEPSIE: This explains why in a decade where immigration is up overall, we see declines in all the different categories you just talked about.

PEARCE: That’s not true!

Watch it:

It’s unclear how Pearce came to his conclusion that 20 percent of all border-crossers have a criminal record. It certainly doesn’t reflect most data that’s out there. Earlier this year, Reason Magazine reported that “people who come here from other countries are actually more law-abiding than the norm.” This makes sense because “most foreigners who make the sacrifice of leaving home and starting over in a strange land do so not to mug grandmothers or molest children, but to find work that will give them a better life.” In concrete terms, the Immigration Policy Center found that, on the national level, U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers.

Stossel is right that, for the most part, crime is done in Arizona. However, there is one exception: Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County. Over the past few years, Arpaio has dedicated a large part of his career to chasing down undocumented immigrants. He’s been the only sheriff in Arizona who has creatively interpreted the state’s human smuggling law in a way that allows Maricopa County to hunt down and charge undocumented immigrants with a felony for being “co-conspirators” in their own smuggling and imprison them in Arpaio’s jails for 90 days at the taxpayer’s expense. However, while the state as a whole averaged a 12 percent decrease in crime from 2002 to 2009, the crime rate in Maricopa County has increased 58 percent.

In his interview with Stossel, Pearce also called the mayor of Phoenix, Phil Gordon, an “anarchist” and proclaimed that the “facts are a stubborn issue.”

As ThinkProgress has reported, the Dove World Church based out of Gainesville, FL, is organizing an “International Burn a Quran Day” on September 11. Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that the hate campaign “could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.” Gen. William Caldwell — the commander of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan — echoed Petraeus’ admonition on CNN yesterday afternoon:

CALDWELL: What I will tell you is that their very actions will in fact jeopardize the safety of the young men and women who are serving in uniform over here and also undermine the very mission that we’re trying to accomplish.

I would hope they would understand that there are second- and third-order — second-, really, and third-order effects that will occur that will affect that young man and woman who’s out there on point for America, serving their nation today, because of their actions back in the United States.

Watch it:

The hate pastor leading the Quran burning is Terry Jones, author of the a book called “Islam Is Of The Devil.” During a combative interview with CNN host Kiran Chetry this morning, Jones seemed unwilling to reconsider his “Burn a Quran Day,” and instead offered his prayers to soldiers who might be put at greater risk:

CHETRY: Are you willing to have the blood of soldiers on your hands by this demonstration?

JONES: Yeah, we are actually very concerned of course. We are taking the General’s words very serious. We are continuing to pray about the action on September the 11th. We are indeed very concerned about it. [...]

CHETRY: So you’re saying you might not well go through with this? [...]

JONES: I am saying we are definitely praying about it. We have firmly made up our mind, but at the same time, we are definitely praying about it.

Jones said that he is “weighing the situation,” but emphasized that he’s not backing down from the event. During the interview, he repeatedly conceded that he “would indeed offend” Muslims. But, he claimed, “peaceful Muslims” should be supporting his hate campaign. “Moderate Muslims should be on our side,” Jones argued.

Chetry, unable to restrain herself any longer, indignantly responded: “No moderate Muslim’s going to be on your side when you’re burning their holy book! I mean, that just sounds silly.” Watch it:

Already, the planned Quran burning has incited large protests in Afghanistan. “Several hundred Afghans rallied outside a Kabul mosque, burning American flags and an effigy of Dove World’s pastor and chanting ‘death to America.’ Members of the crowd briefly pelted a passing U.S. military convoy with stones, but were ordered to stop by rally organizers.”

On Saturday, 3,000 Muslims marched through Indonesia’s capital and five other cities to protest in front of the U.S. embassy, carrying signs saying, “Jihad to protect Koran” and “You burn Qu’ran you burn in hell.”