Jerk - noun: Slang A foolish, rude, or contemptible person.

During a recent lobbying trip to Springfield Rosanna Pulido, the Illinois spokeswoman for “You Don’t Speak for Me,” a group of patriotic Hispanic Americans, and Rick Jones, deputy director of the Chicago Minuteman Project, saw for themselves the level at which Rep. Luis Arroyo’s (D-3rd) mind actually works.

Pulido and Jones had gone to the state capitol to testify against something called the Religious Ministry Act of 2008 (pdf). No doubt you’re asking, “Huh? What the heck does this have to do with immigration.” Well, you see, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights says it’s “needed” to address the “spiritual needs” of a growing number of illegals who (sniff!) are ending up in the slammer because of all those inhumane ICE raids around the country.

But, according to Jones, Arroyo, who is cosponsoring the legislation, “didn’t want to discuss the bill. He only wanted to hurl insults at Rosanna and myself. One question directed at me was, ‘Aren’t the Minutemen the group that kills people on the border?’ ” (I say to Arroyo, as I’ve said to others who make this stupid statement, show me the news stories that support your claim.)

Pulido, who is an American of Mexican descent, said Arroyo twice asked her about her nationality and after she had answered the same way twice, he wanted to know if she opposed providing spiritual comfort to her “fellow Mexicans.”

Memo to Arroyo the Arrogant: Where would you be today if intelligence and common sense were prerequisites for getting elected to public office?

Last year, you may remember, that august body, the Illinois Senate, helped pass legislation later signed into law by Gov. Rod Blagojevich that prohibited Illinois employers from participating in any sort of verification program in order to weed out illegal workers. Something about “workplace privacy,” and, oh, golly, such programs can’t be trusted unless they are 99 percent accurate, etc., etc.

Surprise! The feds promptly sued.[PDF]

Now, in order to get Uncle Sam off their spineless backs and in attempt to save face, these same buffoons voted 57-0 to reverse their earlier stupidity by substituting the word “discourages” for the original “prohibits.” See? All better!

Illinoisans no doubt are sleeping better these days knowing that their “lawmakers” in Springfield are only “discouraging” companies from obeying federal law rather than threatening to punish them for breaking a state law.

The new and improved bill has been sent to the House, where last year it passed 76-39.

You know you’re getting the best of your opponents when they begin hitting below the belt, picking up a handful of sand and throwing it into your eyes, giving you “noogies” when they have you in a head lock, etc.The latest example of such tactics aimed at our side comes from a Feb. 7 program scheduled by the Chicago-based Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR): “Learning From Past Targets of the Politics of Hate: The Internment of Americans of Japanese Descent.”

The “politics of hate.” Hmmmmm. Get the picture here, you mean-spirited, round ‘em up and ship ‘em out fanatics?

The noon-to 1:30 p.m. event, which will be held in the ICIRR’s headquarters and sponsored by the Citizens League, Asian American Institute, Equal Voices Campaign and Albany Park Neighborhood Council, notes that during World War II, 120,000 people of Japanese descent, more than half of them U.S. citizens, were interned in these camps.

Speakers will include two former internees of these camps.

“Bring your lunch and come learn from past struggles!” reads the online flyer.

Now, I don’t care where you stand on whether these internment camps were the result of legitimate national security concerns or blatant racism, I’d like to suggest that the following question is a fair one to put before this program’s sponsors, especially the Asian American Institute: Are you at all bothered that the ICIRR is using the two former internees, i.e., attempting to compare what happened to them more than 60 years ago to the removal of people in this country illegally through strict enforcement of our immigration laws?

Last year Ms. Tucker, a columnist and editorial board member at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, received the prestigious journalism award in the “commentary” category.  The Pulitzer folks said she earned it

for her courageous, clear-headed (emphasis added) columns that evince a strong sense of morality and persuasive knowledge of the community.

Hmmmmmm.

Fast-forward to her Jan. 13, 2008, column, in which Tucker (e-mail) calls for a national uprising against the idea of a Voter ID because (Oh, my God!) it’s nothing more than a clever Republican scheme aimed at stopping America’s poor  from voting for Democrats,  “Voter ID law an ugly effort to subvert ballot,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Political activists from across the ethnic spectrum should convene the biggest political demonstration since the historic March on Washington in 1963.

Where is Al Sharpton when a genuinely critical issue comes along? Where’s Jesse Jackson?

This is “clear-headed” writing that reflects a “persuasive knowledge of the community”?

Black Americans - and the rest of us who are serious students of the Al and Jesse Show - know full well that these two “TV moths” have about as much concern for “genuinely critical issues” as I do about whether Dr. Phil crossed the line when spoke to the media after his visit with the troubled Britney Spears.

Otherwise, don’t you think both would have spoken out years ago about an immigration policy that is sticking it sideways to our poor?

A couple years ago I, along with plenty of other folks, got pretty excited when Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced that he had had it with illegal aliens in his state and, by God, was going to do something about it.

Critics jumped all over what I, and plenty of other folks, thought was a true rule-of-law champion, calling his planned crackdown on illegals an election year stunt. Not so! I hissed at these charges. And then reality began to creep into my stupid, naive world where everybody is supposed to play by the rules.

Seeking to placate “immigrant rights” activists, Gov. Timmy went out of his way to tell the world that the Land of 10,000 Lakes actually was an “immigrant friendly” place and said he wanted an increase in the number of H-1B visas so foreigners could compete with his constituents’ children for high-tech jobs.

Now we hear that Gov. Timmy plans to resume his stumping for Sen. John McCain after the latter’s primary win in New Hampshire. And this announcement raises an interesting question:

Just how will Gov. Timmy’s recent bombshell about renewing his battle against illegal immigration going to fly with “Amnesty John” McCain if the latter ends up sitting in the Oval Office?

Memo to Gov. Timmy: What’s it going to be, your political career–or your country?

Chicago anarchist Emma Lozano, a Communist Party recruiter in that city in the 1970s and godmother to the son of deported Elvira “Church Lady” Arellano, is among those lefty luminaries comprising the Illinois for Hillary Hispanic Leadership Council.

“I am thrilled to have the support of this group of prominent Hispanic leaders from the state of Illinois,” said Senator (Hillary) Clinton. “Too many Hispanic families feel that they are invisible to this president, but when I am president, no American will be invisible.” (Except, perhaps, black Americans, and the others who make up our own working poor).

Lozano is the wife of pseudo-cleric Walter “Slim” Coleman, whose spiffy storefront Methodist church was used by Arellano for a year while she flipped off federal immigration agents and sniveled to anyone carrying a TV camera or reporter’s notebook.

You can see a brief bio of Lozano here. She’s the fifth “fellow” from the top.

Gads! Where did this Ivory Tower twerp get her degrees? From one of those diploma mills that used to grace the covers of matchbooks?

In her Dec. 6 guest opinion, “Where is the civility? Chris Simcox crosses the line,“ that was published in the Arbiter, the student newspaper of Boise State University, American Literature Professor Marcy Newman (e-mail) shrieks about Minuteman founder Simcox’s appearance on the campus she says prides itself on, well, you know, respecting the other fellow’s opinion.

Here’s a sample:

.” . .one might wonder how it is that Chris Simcox, Founder and President of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, was invited to speak on campus. His vigilante organization is founded upon violent principles that target Latinos crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. According to human rights organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, since October 1994 there have been 10,000 people who have died crossing in order to work low-wage jobs in the U.S. or to reunite with family members. That figure reached record levels in April 2005 when Simcox founded his militia. Mexican deaths on the border are due to vigilante shootings as well as deaths related to people being forced to cross under more extreme conditions in order to avoid militias like the Minuteman. A lack of water, food, and extreme weather have contributed to these deaths as well as fear of vigilante groups detaining, harassing, and shooting them.”

Actually, I’m left wondering more about whether these days “professors” are selected from among those educators who prove they do the best job of lying to students searching for what they think is the truth. The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps are “vigilantes?” They are shooting and killing Mexicans attempting to enter this country illegally? (I’m still looking for those news stories that support statements like these made by Newman and others who think nobody is watching and listening when they shoot off their mouths about a subject they know little or nothing about.)

Newman then offers this approach to discussing our immigration crisis in order to ensure that the student body gets the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

“It is perfectly appropriate to discuss issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border on campus, but it should be done in an academic context with non-white scholars or artists who are capable of engaging with the facts and who use research rather than weapons to make their points.”

Memo to the lying Prof. Newman: Would your non-white discussion group include “scholars” like Charles Truxillo, professor of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico, who in 2000 said it is inevitable that the American Southwest will become a new Aztlan and that Mexicans should create it “by any means necessary?”

During the final months of my nearly 30 years in Chicago journalism, I had the misfortune of working for an editor who spent more time sticking her nose into the personal lives of staff members than she did the quality of a now defunct biweekly newspaper that covered news of interest to state and local government officials.

Wandering through our little newsroom muttering her signature complaint, “I don’t get it,” she exemplified a breed of journalists whose editorial talents might - and I emphasize the word might - allow them to handle a paper route.

Hurrah! I said to myself as I left that office for the last time. My suffering through long days of mismanagement and associating with shallow-minded “news gathers” mercifully had come to an end. No more tolerating reporters who got their jobs because Daddy was a powerful Chicago businessman connected to the publisher and who thought that “sink” was the proper short form of the word “synchronization.” No more discovering just minutes before “closing” Page 1 at the end of our production cycle that our political reporter (who has an advanced degree in U.S.history) had begun her story about Texas politics this way: “In Texas politics there is an old saying: As Texas goes, so goes the nation.” I was done with all that.

But, as someone has said, nothing lasts forever.

Nine years later, after joining the immigration restriction movement these incompetent editors and reporters, albeit with different names and faces, reappeared to remind me that accurate, fair and balanced journalism, like Jacob Marley, was as dead as a door nail.

My first real fright was the Chicago Tribune’s Oscar Avila; last summer I added to my list of tormentors Esther Cepeda at the Chicago Sun-Times. In between are those whose names are to numerous to mention but who are equally guilty of crimes against an American public deliberately kept in the dark about a public policy issue finally getting the scrutiny it deserves.

The most recent of these “apparitions” reaffirming that today’s “newsroom scribblers” have a problem dealing with the immigration issue is Andy Granias, editorial page editor of The Badger Herald in Madison, Wis., the nation’s largest campus newspaper and one it says is committed to “objectivity.” (You’ll be hard-pressed to find any of it in the paper’s coverage last month of a “rally for immigrant rights.”)

To my horror, Granias suggested that I didn’t get it when I submitted a letter to his paper criticizing a student’s op-ed for what is a classic example of the pseudo-environmentalism that permeates the U.S. today, “Not easy being green with lazy students,” by Henry Weiner, Nov. 7.

In this piece, Weiner berated his fellow University of Wisconsin students for their cavalier attitude toward the environment, challenging them to knock off their littering of the city’s streets with their empty beer bottles and fast food wrappings, leaving lights burning all night, ignoring running toilets, etc.,etc. OK, Weiner cares enough to remind students that they all can play a role in making their immediate environment a better place for everyone. I’ll give him that. But like so many of these young and impressionable kids, Weiner’s environmental views have been distorted by an education system that prefers not to deal with the truth.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, Weiner is living in Gaylord Nelson country and the best he can come up with as a water conservation measure is “jiggling the handle” on a running toilet?

So, in hopes of stimulating Weiner and others to think outside their campus box, I wrote the following letter to the Herald:

Proper disposal of trash, conserving water, per capita consumption, thermostats set to high and lights left on 24/7 barely begin to deal with the overall problem of how all are directly linked to our exploding population. Unrestrained population growth was the major concern that drove the environmental movement in the 1960s, long before Mr. Weiner and today’s “lazy students” were born. Too many people are the greatest threat to the environment, warned those pioneers of 40 years ago.

But 37 Earth Days later, however, the gains we made to protect our natural beauty and resources are slowly disappearing thanks to an immigration policy that is an unmandated federal policy for forced population growth. Each year this country is being swamped with the arrival of 2 million foreigners, nearly half of them illegal. This is more than four times the annual average of about 250,000 immigrants during the first 200 years of this nation’s history.

Today, immigrants and the birth of their children here account for nearly 90 percent of our population growth. If we continue to grow at this rate, according to the Census Bureau, there will be 420 million people living here in 2050, just 43 years from now. Are you concerned about today’s urban sprawl, overcrowded schools and stressed out hospital emergency rooms, traffic congestion, rising healthcare costs and crime? Are you worried about what this country will look like in 2050 in terms of providing for its people? What kind of standard of living do you imagine for yourselves and your descendents?

Feel free to write me off as a racist, xenophobe, nativist or whatever label used these days in an attempt to silence opponents of mass immigration. But be very careful of how you label the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, who told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2001:

“But in this country, it’s phony to say ‘I’m for the environment but not for limiting immigration.’ It’s just a fact that we can’t take all the people who want to come here. And you don’t have to be a racist to realize that. However, the subject has been driven out of public discussion because everybody is afraid of being called racist if they say they want any limits on immigration.”

Those interested in learning about what happened to the 1960s environmental movement should read the Center for Immigration Studies’ “Forsaking Fundamentals”: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization. (http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/forsaking/toc.html).

Then go to www.numbersusa.com and click on “Immigration Report Cards” to view the voting record of our “environmentalist” U.S. senator, Russ Feingold, who calls Gaylord Nelson a “personal hero.” The only conclusion you can arrive at it is that when it comes to protecting the environment, the “progressive” Mr. Feingold isn’t putting the thousands he receives in corporate campaign contributions where his mouth is.

A week went by, and my letter didn’t appear in print. I dropped a note to Jason Smathers, who oversees the Herald’s editorial page content, and asked if it would run soon.

I am afraid we do not have room to run this piece, replied Smathers.

I fired back, noting that my letter was within the Herald’s word limit and that the health of the environment certainly is important enough to discuss in greater detail than what Weiner had to offer.

Smathers booted my query to Granias (e-mail), who explained the situation this way:

Mr. Gorak:

Indeed environmental issues are important, but this is a piece about immigration. On top of that, you work for an organization that deals directly with immigration and the connection you made to environmental issues is far too roundabout and disconnected to publish. Of course, it is conceivable that the connection could be made, but in your editorial, it was an ineffective attempt. This is certainly unfortunate and we simply have more pertinent material that needs to take up our limited space.

Andy

Memo to Granias: (a) I’m disconnected? and (b) what, in your view, is more pertinent than raising concern about the increasingly tenuous relationship between our shrinking natural resources and a population that grows by one person every 11 seconds?

It looks like life isn’t going to get any easier for Frances Semler, the 73-year-old park board member whose membership in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps caused the National Council of La Raza (The Race) to cancel its 2009 anarchists convention in Kansas City.

Local Hispanic activists, no doubt with the urging of the Mexican government, say they will continue to work for Semler’s removal from her appointed position, [Hispanic advocates will continue to seek Frances Semler's removal from park board, by Bill Graham, The Kansas City Star, Oct. 28, 2007]

“This organization [Minuteman] is creating so much hatred and divisiveness in our communities,” said Dolores C. Huerta, a cofounder of the United Farm Workers of America. “These hysterical attacks on the immigrants, particularly people of color, have turned into discrimination against the whole Hispanic community.”

Huerta, who was in town to receive a “peace” award from a local church, typifies just how far the UFW has strayed since Cesar Chavez fought tooth and nail to prevent illegal workers from undermining his organizing efforts on behalf of migrant workers.

Added Charles Lona, a Hispanic community leader, “The mayor [Mark Funkhouser] is supporting a racist, violent organization. That’s the way we feel.”

Making this story even more troubling is the Star’s ongoing policy of blatant bias in favor of those who consider the rule of law a major roadblock to their agenda.

During my phone conversation with reporter Bill Graham (e-mail), he attempted to defend his one-sided coverage here with the argument that events were moving very fast on an almost daily basis. Huh?

C’mon, Bill! This story has been bubbling along since July, and you and your colleagues still haven’t figured out how to pick up a phone to get a few quotes from our side of the issue? And why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t you bother to contact the Minuteman organization so they could respond to the unfounded charges of racism?

I don’t know whether it did any good, but I politely reminded Graham that my organization is available to him and others at the Star to provide them with perhaps a smidgeon of balance. One can only hope . . .

Unlike the many elected weenies who occupy seats in city halls across the country ( and in Congress), Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser stood his ground against an arrogant National Council of La Raza (The Race) that made good on its threat to cancel its 2009 convention in his city after he refused to withdraw his appointment of 73-year-old Frances Semler, a member of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps., to the park board, [La Raza withdraws ’09 convention from KC, by Deann Smith and Lynn Horsley, The Kansas City Star, Oct. 20. 2007]
“I think she has the right of freedom of association and freedom of speech. I don’t think her belonging to the Minutemen impacts in any way her work on the park board.”
Way to go, Mr. Mayor (e-mail)!

Janet Murguia, The Race’s president and CEO, said the decision to relocate her rule-of-law hating organization’s meeting to friendlier environs was a sad one:

“We had no choice. This is about Mayor Mark Funkhouser and his lack of understanding about an issue, his lack of leadership and his lack of respect for the Hispanic community.” (Read the official statement here.)

Memo to Murguia: I haven’t read it, but I’ll bet your annual salary that nowhere in Kansas City’s charter does it say the mayor’s power to appoint whomever he pleases to whatever is derived from Hispanic organizations that support the violation of our immigration laws.

Comprende?