Today, Capital Wire posted a press release issued by the conservative Latino Coalition denouncing the controversial ads released by Latinos for Reform, another right-leaning political group, which told Latinos not to vote. Latino Coalition president Hector V. Barreto stated:

The Latino Coalition believes in holding all our elected representatives accountable, by actively participating in the democratic process. At the heart of this process is our right and duty as citizens to vote. That we have not achieved Comprehensive Immigration Reform, yet, should motivate us to deepen our participation, not withdraw to the sidelines. [...] What is clear is that any message of abstention to Latinos is terribly ill-founded and contrary to our best interests.

Earlier this week, the president of Latinos for Reform, Robert de Posada, tried to tell MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that the Spanish-version of the ad was more tempered and only called on Latinos not to vote for candidates who betrayed them (the Spanish ad vaguely makes this point, but later clearly tells them not to vote at all). Also, when O’Donnell pointed out that “there are no other Latino organizations on board with this,” de Posada told him that he was simply listening to “a group of [Latino] leaders in Washington, DC who depend on access to the White House.”

Watch de Posada’s interview on MSNBC:

The Latino Coalition’s statement debunks de Posada’s first claim: “the spot’s Spanish translation deviates significantly from its English version, by widening blame to both political parties –as opposed to its English counterpart, which focuses on Democrats – and urging Latino voters not to vote in any election, as opposed to the specific instruction in the English-language spot not to vote in Congressional races only.”

Furthermore, the Latino Coalition also doesn’t have much to do with the current White House. In fact, what their press release curiously doesn’t mention is that the Latino Coalition was founded and led by Robert de Posada himself.

De Posada told Talking Points Memo earlier this week that he created the Hispanic Business Roundtable in 1994, which later became the Latino Coalition which he led until 2007. In fact, when Barreto became president, de Posada issued a statement saying “As national chairman, Hector Barreto will be a leader that helps set the
community on the right course to greater prosperity.”

There’s a lot to recommend in Ken Pollack’s new piece outlining an Iran containment strategy, but I’d put his dismantling of the argument that Iran’s nuclear program can be dealt with through air strikes at the top of the list. Many of the key points — an attack would unify Iranians, deal a death blow to the Green movement, cause the regime to redouble its efforts toward obtaining a nuclear deterrent — have appeared elsewhere, but Pollack assembles them into a methodical and devastating (and, I think, dispositive) argument against the sort of “roll of the dice” that air strikes would represent.

Pollack also dispatches the notion, currently a favorite of those pushing for military action against Iran, that launching preventive strikes wouldn’t really be a war:

Once the United States starts a war with Iran — and launching air strikes will be war — it is impossible to know how it will end, and what would be required of Washington to end it. America may well feel compelled to respond to any Iranian retaliation, setting off a tit-for-tat cycle, raising the risk of escalation on both sides. The incredible paranoia and intractability of the Iranian regime has led to repeated instances in which Tehran refused to abandon courses of action even though it was suffering horrific damage — remember the hostage crisis? The Iran-Iraq war? In other words, the same behavior patterns that make it hard for the United States to coerce Iran by sanctions also make it unlikely that Washington can coerce the Islamic Republic by war. As we should have learned in Iraq, wars always entail very significant unforeseen consequences, and we need to recognize that bombing Iran could lead us down unexpected paths to even-worse outcomes (like invading and occupying Iran) to end what we started.

With a country as difficult as Iran, the United States should only launch air strikes if it is ready to pay all of the potential costs — and there are few Americans ready to bear the price of another major U.S. war in the Middle East.

After seven years in Iraq, and almost ten years in Afghanistan, Americans are clearly not enthusiastic about getting into another war, which is why the Bomber Boys would much rather not have to discuss the actual implications or likely consequences of the “military action” they keep calling for. It’s also why it’s important that they be forced to. Because at the end of the day, there’s only one way that Iran’s nuclear program will be dealt with to anyone’s satisfaction: Inspections. The only question is whether those inspections will be conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, under the auspices of the United Nations, or by occupying U.S. troops.

Last night, Pennsylvania Democratic and Republican U.S. Senate candidates Rep. Joe Sestak and Pat Toomey debated a variety of issues before a national television audience.

At one point during the debate, one of the moderators asked the two candidates about their thoughts on “fat” in the Pentagon budget that needs to be cut out. Sestak responded first, boasting that even though “some parts of [the F-22]” — a program the Obama administration’s Pentagon has struggled to end — are built in his district, he supported ending funding for the unnecessary program. Interestingly, Toomey, while reiterating that he wants to give our troops “all the resources they need to get the job done,” insisted that “there is waste pretty much everywhere in the government, and that includes the Pentagon. Part of the problem is voting on systems the Pentagon doesn’t even want”:

TOOMEY: My dad’s a veteran of the Korean War era. My brother in law served 20 years in the Navy. One of the things that’s very, very important to me is to make sure that when we ask me and women to go into harm’s way, they have all the resources they need to get the job done. I have always voted to provide those resources, and I always will. But the fact is, there is waste pretty much everywhere in the government, and that includes the Pentagon. Part of the problem is Congress voting on systems the Pentagon doesn’t even want. Congress has real serious spending problems, and it manifests itself in many ways. Certainly wasteful defense programs are occasionally in that list.

Watch it:

Toomey’s statement makes him at least the fourth Republican running for Senate who has gone on the record as saying that defense cuts are necessary in order to deal with the budget deficit and tackle waste in government. Last week, Illinois candidate Mark Kirk said we need “across the board” reductions in defense spending. Earlier this month, Sen. Johnny Isakson (GA) told a local news station that reducing the deficit “begins with the Department of Defense.” A few days later, Kentucky candidate Rand Paul criticized Republicans for exempting the military from waste-trimming, telling Gwen Ifill that cutting defense spending “has to be on the table.”

If these Republicans are really serious about reining in the defense budget, they can look to The Sustainable Defense Task (SDTF) report released earlier this year. Assembled by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and consisting of the nation’s leading defense and budget experts, the SDTF identified nearly $1 trillion in waste that can be cut from the defense budget over the next ten years simply by eliminating outdated Cold War-era programs. They could also reference a recent report by CAP experts Lawrence Korb and Laura Conley that lays out $108 billion in defense cuts in the current 2015 budget forecast.

This past summer, ThinkProgress twice reported that Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) went on cable news television to propagate his claim that pregnant Middle Eastern women are traveling to the U.S. to have babies who will automatically become U.S. citizens and later return here when they are older to “blow us up.”

Christian Cutler, who until recently, was the art gallery director at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA), was also watching Gohmert’s appearances and decided he didn’t want anything to do with the high school art show Gohmert had asked him to judge. According to Cutler, after hearing Gohmert’s statements, he called one of his aides and told her that he had decided against judging the competition, saying “I really don’t want to associate myself with Congressman Gohmert and I felt he was a sensationalist and from recent information via the Web and television I felt like he was a fear monger.”

Ten days later, he received a letter from Gohmert who wrote that he “disagrees” with Cutler’s remarks, “but will defend to the death your right to be misinformed.” Gohmert also revealed that the art show was supposed to be hosted at SFA (a detail Cutler was not previously aware of) and that he was moving it somewhere else. SFA college president Baker Pattillo was copied. Cutler tried to apologize and explain that he wouldn’t have pulled out of the art show had he known it was being held at his school, but to no avail. Shortly thereafter, Cutler was forced to resign from his job.

KTRE9 reports that now, “Cutler frantically searches for a job to support his family.” He claims to have learned his lesson: “Maybe keeping those personal opinions to myself,” he said. Watch KTRE9′s report:

Gohmert maintains that he “did not ask nor desire that the Director of Art Galleries be dismissed and am not aware of all of the reasons for his dismissal,” suggesting that perhaps Cutler’s termination had something to do with his job performance. However, Cutler claims he received “outstanding” performance reviews in the three years he worked for SFA.

(HT: TPM)