Several House Democrats spoke at a rally this week in front of the Alabama legislature in opposition to HB 56, an immigration-enforcement bill patterned after Arizona's "papers please" law. They linked their own historical struggle for civil rights in Alabama to the battle being waged over immigration. As I watched, it occurred to me that Alabama might be the first state where local history provides a focus for opposition to the tea-fueled wave of pandering state immigration bills. This took place just blocks from the Civil Rights Museum and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church:

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Sarah Palin believes that President Barack Obama doesn't have what it takes to enforce immigration laws but Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer does.

"Jan Brewer has the cojones that our president does not have to look out for all Americans, not just Arizonans, but all Americans in our desire of our to secure our borders and allow legal immigration to help build this country as was the purpose of immigration laws," Palin said during an appearance on Fox Sunday.

Palin also blamed the media for her low approval numbers.

"If I believed everything I read or heard in the media, I wouldn't like me either," she said.

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This post by Digby was too good not to pass along. Real Americans Love Racial Profiling:

Chuck Todd subbing for Chris Matthews:

"There's growing evidence that Americans are willing to put up with racial profiling if it means their safety."

What do you mean "Americans" white man? I suspect Hispanic Americans, African Americans and Arab Americans tend to see their "safety" in slightly different terms.

But then they aren't Real Americans, are they?

I'd like to see the racial breakdown of that poll Todd was citing. As Dave already noted here, being a racist and in the majority doesn't make you right. Polls on Arizona immigration law remind us of a historic truth: Discarding the civil rights of others is always a popular idea. It would be nice if the Chuck Todds and Hardball producers of the world and their cohorts in the media took some time to read it. No instead Hardball had Tom Tancredo on and treated him as though he had something valid to say on the matter. I guess Michelle Malkin or David Duke weren't available.

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Larry King decides to do a bit of turd polishing for Alberto Gonzales and has him weigh in on Arizona's new "show me your papers" law. I'd like to know why King thought it was a better idea to bring Gonzo on to talk about this instead of his actions as Attorney General.

We've done a great deal of reporting on Gonzo which you can check out here. The list is absolutely too long to rehash with what he did to the Department of Justice, the Attorney General's scandal and with his defense of torture. As Jon Perr noted, Gonzo has taken to playing the victim card of late -- Alberto Gonzales: Bush DOJ Was Not Political Enough:

For most people, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a national embarrassment, a pimple on the ass of American history. But to hear him tell it, the man George W. Bush called "Fredo" is a victim of partisan warfare. And the lesson he apparently learned in Washington is not that he politicized the Bush Justice Department, but that he didn't politicize it enough.

Those are among the head-shaking takeaways in a brief but revealing interview in Esquire titled, "Alberto Gonzales: What I've Learned." The man who repeatedly lied to Congress about the U.S. prosecutors purge, President Bush's illegal program of domestic surveillance and regime of detainee torture was just an innocent bystander caught in the political crossfire.

...But as he acknowledged to Esquire this week, Gonzales' real lament about the U.S. attorneys firings is that the Bush White House wasn't political enough. After the Republican losses in the 2006 midterm elections, Gonzales suggested, the Bush administration's error was that it simply couldn't get away it.

Now Larry King thinks he should be a political commentator. This is what happens when administrations decide to let the crimes of the previous administration go unpunished. They wind up with their ass on TV being a political commentator instead of in jail. Of course in the case of ClusterFox they can be convicted and still get air time. Sadly even if in some fantasy world Alberto Gonzales were ever put on trial and convicted, he'd likely end up like North and never serve any jail time.

CNN, the network that has been trying to paint itself as centrist and non-political seems to have more than its fair share of Bushies on their network. Whether it be Fran Townsend, Michael Chertoff, David Frum Torie Clark or Ed Gillespie among others, they're more than willing to give these mouth pieces from the failed Bush administration credibility at every turn.

And speaking of cases that nothing's been done about since the Obama DOJ took charge, I'd also love to know why the Obama administration hasn't done anything to rectify the Don Seigelman case.

Rachel takes the President of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) to the woodshed in this interview over his organization's motivations for supporting Arizona's new "show me your papers" law and his group's racist history. He attacked Maddow and the Southern Poverty Law Center and claimed they were just trying to smear him.

The SPLC has more here -- Answering Our Critics: SPLC ‘Smear’ Dissected:

The suggestion that the SPLC worked surreptitiously with La Raza and others to designate FAIR a hate group is false; the decision to list the organization was made by the SPLC alone, based on almost a decade of SPLC research. We make no apologies for sharing that research with others in the human rights community, including La Raza, which we consider an important ally.

FAIR, an organization that has been dominated for much of its life by its racist founder John Tanton, has probably done more to inject fear and bigotry into the national immigration debate than any other modern organization. Its demonizing propaganda, aimed primarily at Latinos, comes at a time when the number of hate groups continues a decade-long rise, fueled by anti-Latino hatred. At the same time, the FBI reported a 40% rise in anti-Latino hate crimes between 2003 and 2007. Those crimes decreased slightly in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available.

What follows is a list of factors that resulted in the listing of FAIR as a hate group. More detailed information on FAIR and its founder may be found here and here. Read on...

The Rachel Maddow blog already started fact checking Stein on their site (h/t Laffy):

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Heaven forbid Tom Tancredo could have ever allowed himself to look like a voice of sanity on this extreme Arizona immigration law.

Tancredo: I Always Thought AZ Immigration Was A Good Law!:

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo doesn't want you to get the wrong idea -- he never thought the Arizona immigration law went too far.

On MSNBC today, Tancredo (R-CO) clarified that though he said he does not want people in Arizona "pulled over because you look like you should be pulled over," he wasn't saying that he's against the law. Because, he said, "that is not the law."

"I like the law," said Tancredo, adding that "the fact is that it's a good law. I think that Arizona needed to do it."

He continued that he did say he would never vote for a law that required people to be pulled over for looking a certain way, but he had also said that the Arizona law doesn't require that, and his remarks were taken out of context.