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I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm going to watch a debate about what members of the House and Senate are considering on immigration reform, someone who is a member of an organization with ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists is the last person I'd like to see have a seat at that table. But that's exactly who CNN thought was worth bringing on to discuss the topic during this segment on The Situation Room this Monday.

Lou Dobbs may be gone, but it seems his tradition of inviting extremists on the air to discuss immigration policy remains.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has more on Stein and his group here: Federation for American Immigration Reform:

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a group with one mission: to severely limit immigration into the United States. Although FAIR maintains a veneer of legitimacy that has allowed its principals to testify in Congress and lobby the federal government, this veneer hides much ugliness. FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the group’s main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans. FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a "mistake." [...]

Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites.

FAIR stopped receiving Pioneer Fund grants in 1994 due to bad publicity it received when the grants were made public. At the time, FAIR was backing California's punishing anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have denied education and health care to the children of undocumented immigrants in that state if it had not died as the result of court challenges. Stein and Tanton had led FAIR's efforts to win funding from Pioneer, and Stein said in 1993, before Pioneer's extremism was made public, that his "job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer's money."

There's lots more there in their full report, so go read the rest.

Full transcript below the fold.

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It looks like Boehner blinked on the payroll tax holiday extension -- BREAKING: House Republicans Cave, Agree To Two-Month Payroll Tax Cut Extension:

A top Senate Democratic aide says House Republicans have privately offered up the terms of their surrender on the payroll tax cut, pending sign off from their notoriously unwieldy caucus.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) suggested Thursday morning, it will involve House Republicans passing a temporary extension of the payroll tax cut (and unemployment insurance and reimbursement rates for Medicare physicians) in exchange for Senate Dems agreeing to a formal conference committee to work out a year-long extension of all items.

The temporary extension won’t be identical to the one Senate Dems passed. It will differ in very minor technical ways. House Republicans have already rejected the bipartisan Senate compromise bill, so they’ll have to draw up essentially the same bill from scratch, pass it in the House and then have the Senate readopt it by unanimous consent.

In exchange, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will agree to a formal conference committee. The House will bring its partisan, one-year extenders bill to the table (complete with policy riders and pay-fors that cut programs like Medicare) and the Senate will bring the bipartisan legislation that passed overwhelmingly on Saturday.

This is a fairly minor concession for Reid. He’s been on the record for days now saying he’d resume negotiations on a full-year extension as soon as the House passed the Senate bill. He’s saying that instead of taking the lead on those negotiations with Boehner and McConnell, that a formal conference committee would get first bite at the apple.

As the CNN reporters noted in the clip above, it looks like House Republicans were taking some heat from their own constituents who were upset over them over their obstruction.

Karoli adds:

This is a huge defeat for John Boehner and the House Tea Party Republicans. How big? Via Steve Benen:

If Boehner were a stronger, more effective House Speaker, this fiasco could have been easily avoided. He could have told his caucus this was a fight they were likely to lose, so passing the Senate bill quickly was the smart course of action. But he couldn’t — Boehner takes orders; he doesn’t give them.

It’s what helps make this story a disaster, not only for Republicans in general, but also for John Boehner personally. As he surrenders this afternoon, Boehner becomes The Speaker Who Has No Clothes.

He stuck out his neck, vowing not to cave, knowing he’d likely have to cave anyway. Boehner than waited until the pressure became unbearable — after he’d lost face and friends — and walked away with his tail between his legs.

Neither party has had a Speaker this feeble in modern times. His instincts told him to take the deal over the weekend, but Boehner allowed himself to be pushed around by his unhinged caucus, then get pushed around by Democrats, then get pushed around by his allies, then get pushed around by Senate Republicans.

How big a disaster was this for Boehner? Keep an eye on whether Eric Cantor’s travel schedule changes over the holidays.

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What do you know. Republican North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones sounds like a liberal here. Now that Osama bin Laden has been killed, there are a growing number of calls for the United States to get out of Afghanistan. This is long past due.

CNN:

BLITZER: After the death of bin Laden, CNN is now taking an in- depth look at the war in Afghanistan, a war that some U.S. lawmakers are now saying should end quickly.

Our congressional correspondent Kate Bolduan is joining us now with some of the details.

Kate, what's going on here?

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the death of Osama bin Laden has renewed the debate here on Capitol Hill, as well as elsewhere, about the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It's also renewed the push by some liberal Democrats and some fiscal conservatives calling for the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan altogether, and do that sooner rather than later.

North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones and Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern, they both have been long opposed to the war in Afghanistan. They are rolling out a bill come Thursday that would require the White House provide a concrete timeline and specific dates for the U.S. to pull all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan. The administration now, their timeline is to begin the withdrawal in July and finish up in 2014.

I spoke with Congressman Jones earlier today about what he thinks the death of Osama bin Laden should mean for U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Listen here.

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