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Don Young Uses 'Wetbacks' To Describe Latinos


Don Young (R-Alaska), center, pictured on June 7, 2001, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/03/28/republican-rep-don-young-refers-to-latinos-using-racial-slur/ ] turned heads on Thursday, using a racial slur to describe Latinos.

Addressing the United States' jobs situation in a radio interview with KRBD-FM [ http://www.krbd.org/2013/03/28/don-young-talks-regs-budget-economy-arctic-development/ ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB3ryiR66RE , below)], Young admitted that technology has impacted the market. In the process, he chose the term "wetbacks" to describe the workers his father employed.

“My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes,” Young said. “It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”

A little less than two weeks ago, word broke that Young is under investigation [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/19/don-young-rob-andrews_n_2908565.html ] for alleged ethics violations that include failure to report gifts on financial disclosure forms and lying to federal officials. The Anchorage Daily News reported Thursday that Young told reporters [ http://www.adn.com/2013/03/28/2843697/young-responds-to-new-ethics-investigation.html ] the FBI has already found him "totally innocent of" any charges.

Young was easily reelected to his 21st term [ http://donyoung.house.gov/biography/ ] as Alaska's lone representative in Congress, defeating Democrat Sharon Cissna [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/results/alaska#house-races ] by more than 35 percentage points.

UPDATE (7:25 a.m.) -- According to NBC News' First Read [ http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/28/17509106-gop-congressman-uses-ethnic-slur-to-describe-laborers ], Young released a statement vowing that he "meant no disrespect" with his comments.

"During a sit down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California," the statement said.

"I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays and I meant no disrespect."

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/29/don-young-wetbacks_n_2976351.html [with embedded video reports, and comments]


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Attacks on Thomas Perez will do wonders for GOP Latino outreach

Posted by Greg Sargent on March 18, 2013 at 2:47 pm

This morning the Republican National Committee released a report [ http://www.scribd.com/doc/130999130/RNC-Growth-Opportunity-Book-2013 ] 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 that some 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 [ http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/2013/03/18/us-senator-puts-block-on-president-obama-nomination-for-secretary-of-labor/ ] 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 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/us/politics/obama-to-nominate-thomas-e-perez-as-labor-secretary.html ].

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.

It’s not hard to see why conservatives hate Perez’s record at the civil rights division. As Adam Serwer recently summarized [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/thomas-perez-secretary-labor-grassley-progressive ]:

Since Perez took the helm, the division has blocked partisan voting schemes [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/us/justice-dept-blocks-texas-photo-id-law.html ], cracked down on police brutality [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/us/politics/03rights.html ], protected gay and lesbian students from harassment [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/06/news/la-minnesota-school-district-gay-bullying-settlement-20120306 ], sued anti-immigrant Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for racial profiling [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/most-unconstitutional-sheriff-america ], stood up against Islamophobia [ http://prospect.org/article/tennessee-doj-objectively-pro-sharia ], and forced the two largest fair-housing settlements [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/us-settlement-reported-on-countrywide-lending.html ] in history from banks that discriminated against minority homeowners [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/business/wells-fargo-to-settle-mortgage-discrimination-charges.html ].

Conservatives are already signaling that they are going to tee off Perez’s record to go the lurid and racially charged route. Michele Malkin, for instance, dismissed [ http://michellemalkin.com/2013/03/13/obamas-nominee-for-secretary-of-illegal-alien-labor/ ] Perez as “Obama’s nominee for secretary of (illegal alien) labor.” Rush Limbaugh says [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2013/03/18/limbaugh-compares-secretary-of-labor-nominee-to/193094 ]: “He is the guy in the Department of Justice in the civil rights division who made the call not to prosecute the New Black Panthers,” adding: “He may as well be Hugh Chavez.”

Remember, there’s precedent here. When Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court justice, some conservatives and Republicans denounced her as “little more than an affirmative action hire,” as Jamelle Bouie put it [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/why-romney-is-losing-latinos-by-a-historic-margin/2012/11/05/3208665c-2761-11e2-ac64-5d52a2c5953e_blog.html ], and even attacked her [ http://www.sessions.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressShop.NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=3d05d873-0b31-ad03-c24d-f257acae51d4&Region_id=&Issue_id=&IsPrint=true ] for her membership in a Latino civil rights organization, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Educational Fund, claiming it had been tied to ACORN. This may well have been one of the factors that led to Mitt Romney’s historic losing margin among Latinos.

Now that the confirmation process for another highly regarded Latino is set to unfold, the right will be rolling out a similar sounding set of attacks — extremist, radical, secret agent for illegal immigrants under the guise of civil rights — and possibly even some of its favorite racially charged golden oldies from Obama’s first term. That will create a tricky balancing act for those Republicans who agree with the RNC’s diagnosis of the need to repair relations with Latinos. How will they respond if their friends on the right go down that familiar road?

© 2013 The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/03/18/attacks-on-thomas-perez-will-do-wonders-for-gop-latino-outreach/ [with comments]


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Let's Reach Out to Swing Voters by Resurrecting the New Black Panther Case


U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) in 2011.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

By David Weigel
Posted Monday, March 18, 2013, at 2:23 PM

The nomination of Tom Perez to run the Department of Labor is functioning, so far, as a highly sophisticated bit of trolling. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter is the first to get trolled [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/18/obama-to-nominate-justice-official-to-top-labor-post/ ].

"Thomas Perez's record should be met with great suspicion by my colleagues for his spotty work related to the New Black Panther case, but Louisianians most certainly should have cause for concern about this nomination," Vitter said in a statement.

The senator went on to cite a separate incident in which the Justice Department filed suit against Louisiana over its voter registration efforts.

The latter case, from 2011, concerns a DOJ investigation of whether Louisiana was fulfilling an obligation to offer voter registration to people showing up at welfare offices. (They're supposed to.) Vitter had two complaints [ http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2011/11/15/senator-vitter-charges-eric-holder-with-selective-enforcement-of-election-laws/ ]: The sting wasn't happening in other states, and DOJ wasn't simultaneously doing enough to enforce voter ID laws. Fair enough. Perez was running the DOJ's Civil Rights Division at the time. But he wasn't there during the New Black Panther case and its aftermath. The rap against him is based on his failure to say that political appointees were aware of the decision to drop the case, though non-political appointees were the ones who dropped it.

UPDATE: And comes now Rush Limbaugh [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/03/18/cyprus_and_perez_should_be_big_news ]:

This guy, Tom Perez, is a Hugo Chavezite who may be "the most radical left-wing cabinet member in history." Now, J. Christian Adams' book is Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. He described this guy, Perez, in it. But the New Black Panther case is just one case that this guy was involved in.

He wasn't involved with the case! This is going to take a while.

© 2013 The Slate Group, LLC (emphasis in original)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/03/18/let_s_reach_out_to_swing_voters_by_resurrecting_the_new_black_panther_case.html [with comments]


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