March 18, 2013

WaPo: GOP can't object to Obama's nomination of Xochitl Hinojosa's old boss because he's Hispanic

Thomas E. Perez and his boss Eric Holder
Greg Sargent explains in the Washington Post:
Attacks on Thomas Perez will do wonders for GOP Latino outreach 
This morning the Republican National Committee released a report that purports to examine everything that’s wrong with the GOP, one that has a heavy emphasis on repairing relations with Latinos. “By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent, up from 17 percent now,” the report laments, adding that unless Republicans “get serious” about tackling their minority outreach problem, “we will lose future elections.” 
Only a few hours later, it is now clear thatsome Republicans will do all they can to block Obama’s first Latino pick for his second-term cabinet — and the right is gearing up for a campaign against him that will make the effort to block Chuck Hagel look like a knitting seminar. Given Thomas Perez’s background as the son of Dominican immigrants, plus his role running the Justice Department’s civil rights division, this isn’t going to make the RNC’s “outreach” to Latinos any easier. 
Senator David Vitter announced today that he will put a “hold” on Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez as labor secretary, partly on the grounds of his work on … the New Black Panther case. Other Republican Senators plan to paint Perez as a “radical legal activist” who has “tried to help illegal immigrants avoid detection,” as the New York Times puts it. 
To be clear, it is fair game for Republicans to use the nomination process to ask legitimate questions about a nominee, and to raise substantive objections to that nominee. But if the attacks on Perez veer into the lurid and racially charged, it will be very interesting to see how Republicans who agree with the RNC’s analysis of the GOP’s problems handle it.

Of course, any and all criticism of Perez's handling of the civil rights division in Obama's first term will be denounced as "racially charged."

P.S., for newcomers, here's the explanation of the Xochitl Hinojosa reference.

34 comments:

  1. Rise of Jew/mulatto/conqui/gay power isn't so much the rise of anti-white elite as 'new white' elite against the 'old white' elite.

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  2. GOP should find a blonde Hispanic named Quetzalcoatl to win the Mexican vote.

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  3. This is the first time I had to hit 'reload' on a captcha. Are the making them harder now?

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  4. The 'listen to captcha spoken' button is a scary voice.

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  5. Not related, but something that has been commented on here, Lanza:

    "This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills,” a police officer who heard the talk said.

    http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/world/sandy-hook-killer-adam-lanza-planned-attack-for-years-wanted-highest-score/story-fnd12peo-1226600204879

    How are those gun free school zones working for you?

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  6. At least he's not as thoroughly Caucasian-looking as, say, Marco Rubio or Xochitl herself. You can see traces of black ancestry, though a person of his appearance in the D.R. itself would be considered white rather than mulatto.

    Peter

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  7. Xochitl
    Xochitl was wife of the Toltec Emperor Tecpancaltzin.
    Xochitl called upon other women to join her in battle, and created and led a battalion made entirely of women soldiers.

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  8. Orson Welles3/18/13, 4:28 PM

    Most of these Hispanic elites look about as mestizo as Charlton Heston's Mexican cop character in "Touch of Evil."

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  9. Interesting that both Holder and Perez come from the majority Black Caribbean countries where lightness of skin is most prized (and they themselves have that light skin).

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  10. The GOP is called "The Stupid Party," but I wonder if ANY politician could be this stupid? This innumerate? This out of touch?

    It's time to entertain the idea that the GOP is fake opposition. The Republicans seem to be throwing a lot of fights lately. Their his-PANIC takes the cake. Maybe they aren't committing suicide - maybe they're committing murder.

    Is there really a Republican Party anymore? Maybe there's only a mob of selfish, short-sighted grafters, steered by crooked ideologues.

    In any case, it's clear to anyone with a functioning brain that the GOP's white MAJORITY has no reason to capitulate to a MINORITY, whose numbers and power come only from capitulation.

    Time to buck like blue hell, my friends. Send every current GOPer into the discard. Jeb and Rubio and the rest should be flushed twice.

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  11. Heston at least grew the "hey guys I'm not Indian" mustache a la Vincente Fox.

    Maybe the NRA should claim they can't be rascist because the used to have a Hispanic president.

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  12. Re. Heston in "Touch of Evil."

    Welles made the point to Heston and others that the Heston character is one of the elite of Mexico. He went to Harvard, he speaks without an accent, and he marries white (the Janet Leigh character). The movie is in "touch" on this score. (Heston's character isn't a border cop, but a high official in the Mexican govt. who's just passing through town.) The Grandi family represent the more mestizo Mexicans. What most pissed off Universal was probably the movie's depiction of racial tensions and realities that weren't perfectly orthodox. A 1950s Stanley Kramer sermon this wasn't.

    Supposedly one very white and very angry lady at the preview marched up to one of the studio people in the back and hit him with her purse, saying, "This is the dirtiest movie I've ever seen!"

    Well worth another look.

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  13. "By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent ... that unless Republicans “get serious” about tackling their minority outreach problem, “we will lose future elections.”


    So liberals are openly saying that Hispanics are racists who will only vote for a Hispanic so you need to field Hispanic candidates.

    In a mufti-ethnic state where everybody votes for a candidate of their own ethnic, shouldn't you go for the ethnic that is greatest percent?

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  14. A disproportionate number of the best comments on this site are marked as Anonymous, and are often signed with initials or a first name. The least interesting comments are signed with what look like real names, presumably because these are from people who have nothing to lose if they are found to spend time on a "far-right" website. Someday if I have time, I'd like to rate isteve commenters under some popular post, and show how things other things like gramatical sloppiness and length of comment correlate to thoughtfulness. I suspect the most insightful comments are about as long as this one (not that this is one of the most insightful comments), and have one or two typos.

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  15. "I suspect the most insightful comments ... have one or two typos."


    Comment box does have spell check. You could switch it off to see how grammatical people really are.

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  16. Harry Baldwin3/18/13, 5:51 PM

    If I were judging by appearance, I would guess Perez was Jewish. He resembles many Jews I know. It wouldn't occur to me that he was Hispanic or heralded from the Dominican Republic. Wikipedia mentions that his wife is Jewish, but doesn't clarify that matter regarding him.

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  17. My experience is opposite: anonymous comments, like yours, are disproportionately poor.

    The fact that you believe that most of the obvious pseudonyms used on this site are real names doesn't speak highly for your cleverness.

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  18. Perhaps a better Republican strategy would be to "get serious" about reducing the size of the minority population rather then an "outreach strategy" that will go nowhere.

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  19. “By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent, up from 17 percent now,”

    Is that correct? I thought by 2043 whites would become less than 50%. And beyond that towards the next century Hispanics alone would approach 50% of the population. Saying Hispanics will be 29% by 2050 seems to be a little low.

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  20. Weinberger was just trying to burnish his patriotic, converso bonifides by crucifying Pollard.

    Weinberger was not a converso. His mother was a Christian and he was born and raised in her faith.

    No American ever got a sentence that harsh for peacetime spying.

    Maybe if we could read The File we could make a better assessment of his sentence.

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  21. By 2050, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population could be as high as 29 percent, up from 17 percent now

    I seriously doubt there will be a U.S. in 2050.

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  22. People who fret about 'Latino outreach' must not have met many typical 'Latinos'. Otherwise they'd have seen that huge numbers of 'Latinos' are a huge problem for America, as in Are they really going to be able to create enough wealth to pay for my Social Security and Medicare? That's what they ought to be fretting about.

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  23. Jews have chosen mulattos and conquis, along with gays, as the 'new Jews'.

    LOL, almost.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism

    Recent genetic research, however, has shown that many Latinos of the American Southwest may be descended from Anusim (Sephardic Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism). Michael Hammer, a research professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on Jewish genetics, said that fewer than 1% of non-Semites, but more than four times the entire Jewish population of the world, possessed the male-specific "Cohanim marker" (which in itself is not necessarily carried by all Jews, but is prevalent among Jews claiming descent from hereditary priests), and 30 of 78 Latinos tested in New Mexico (38.5%) were found to be carriers. DNA testing of Hispanic populations also revealed between 10% and 15% of men living in New Mexico, south Texas and northern Mexico have a Y chromosome that traces back to the Middle East.

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  24. RE: Thomas Perez,

    The man's racial identity is practically Heisenbergian; presumably, collapse of the wave function occurs only when viewed from certain political angles.

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  25. Seems like a male version of Soledad O'Brien: A White person who fully exploits the blood quantum for maximum effect.

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  26. @David

    "It's time to entertain the idea that the GOP is fake opposition. The Republicans seem to be throwing a lot of fights lately. Their his-PANIC takes the cake".

    The same thing crossed my mind as I was listening to the findings from a Republican post-election commission disclosed after CPAC. Since more voting illegal aliens means more Democratic votes, as anybody with half a brain could tell ya, why would you ever support amnesty unless you made a pact with the phony opposition to share power behind the scenes in a one party state? Perhaps they are even trying to expedite this as part of the deal. I put nothing past Karl Rove and the Bush clan.

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  27. Anonymous @ 8:48

    You are so right. The possible presence of a few conversos among the old spanish southwestern families is a probably a major cause of the current hispandering by the US political elite.

    Intrawhite status competition, cheap labor, and larger domestic markets for consumer goods and housing are clearly secondary motivations. As is the dream of permanent political hegemony via the importation of client populations. It's all about that precious, precious Cohanim marker. After all, what kind of elite concentrates its efforts in securing money, status, and power?

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  28. Has anybody in the Acela press thought to call up Some Of Our Leading Hispanics for opinions on what to do about the Klan terrorist rampage sweeping the countryside? Perhaps they'd have a novel outsider's insight into the best strategy.

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  29. David said: Is there really a Republican Party anymore? Maybe there's only a mob of selfish, short-sighted grafters, steered by crooked ideologues.

    Hunsdon said: Increasingly, sir, that's what I think. Let's look at it this way. Say you're a senator, a Republican, even. What's your goal? To keep your job. As long as you can keep that fat government paycheck rolling in, does it really matter what happens to the country? You've got yours, after all.

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  30. Republicans needs to play blacks and hispanics off against each other. That way they could pick up a lot of hispanic votes on the basis of "latinos might not be as good as whites, but no way in hell are they as bad as blacks." Latinos whose resentment towards whites exceeds their hatred of blacks will stick with Democrats; those feel the opposite way should go GOP.

    That would openly represent the teensiest bit of racial realism seeping through into mainstream politics, but it'd be a start.

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  31. What should this be called?

    Racial dualism?

    Jews, gays, conquis, and even mulattos benefiting from 'white privilege' while at the same time standing apart from whites.

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  32. "Xochitl
    Xochitl was wife of the Toltec Emperor Tecpancaltzin.
    Xochitl called upon other women to join her in battle, and created and led a battalion made entirely of women soldiers. "

    "Her existence beyond legend is questionable, and accounts of her life are mainly based on the writings of indigenous historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl."

    "Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl (b. between 1568 and 1580, Texcoco—1648, Mexico City) was a Novohispanic historian."

    ancient nerd with butt-kicking babe fantasy?
    look at his surname, and you thought xochitl was hard.

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  33. Opposition to Perez's nomination would actually be a good way for Republicans to point out the Obama Administration's blatant racism and enable them to win a larger share of the white vote without having to raise the race issue separately (e.g., a campaign ad opposing affirmative action or illegal immigration).

    This is how the Republicans start getting the same share of the white vote that Democrats get from blacks and Hispanics. Obama is foolish to nominate him and Republicans would be foolish not to filibuster. Naturally the GOP will roll over and let the nomination through.

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  34. Perez and disparate impact

    The Talented Mr. Perez

    How Obama's Labor nominee muscled a city to drop a Supreme Court case.

    These columns first reported on the curious St. Paul episode in February 2012 ("Squeezed in St. Paul"), after the Minnesota city withdrew a case that it had spent almost a decade litigating and that the U.S. Supreme Court had already agreed to hear. We've since learned more about how it happened, and we've seen emails that illustrate the strong-arm role played by Mr. Perez in his current job as head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. It's a story of how political muscle undermined the rule of law.

    ***

    Mr. Perez is a champion of disparate-impact theory, which purports to prove racial discrimination by examining statistics rather than intent or specific cases. Soon after Mr. Perez assumed his job in October 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder established a unit under Mr. Perez to examine loans to minorities. The unit proceeded to threaten a series of lawsuits against banks under the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

    The lenders quickly settled these cases rather than run the reputational risk of being called racist in court. But on November 7, 2011 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the City of St. Paul's appeal in Magner v. Gallagher, which concerned the legality of disparate-impact theory in housing. St. Paul believed it had an excellent chance to prevail because the text of the Fair Housing Act doesn't explicitly allow for disparate impact.

    That's when the Obama Administration kicked into gear. On November 17, Mr. Perez emailed a former colleague, Thomas Fraser at the Fredrikson & Byron law firm in Minnesota, to probe if city officials might be convinced to withdraw Magner, according to documents that the Justice Department sent to Congressional investigators. Mr. Fraser referred Mr. Perez to his colleague, David Lillehaug, who was advising St. Paul on a pending False Claims Act case against the city filed by a private citizen.
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324281004578356581889324790.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

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