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Bryan Fischer is a big fan of Niall Ferguson’s bogus claim (which he has since renounced) that John Maynard Keynes did not care about how his economic policies impacted future generations because, as a gay man, he didn’t plan to have children.

The American Family Association spokesman took issue with Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor, whom Fischer called a member of the “pro-sodomy gestapo, the gaystapo,” for criticizing Ferguson when he is in fact “exactly right” for blaming the 2008 financial crisis on the gay community.

“He was a narcissist, he was a hedonist and he was a homosexual,” Fischer said, “his view of history is very shortsighted, short-circuited, he cared about himself and his generation exclusively; so homosexuality in the end is going to be responsible for the collapse of the Western economy.”

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Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan has been one of the Right’s most reliably xenophobic voices against immigration reform. On Friday’s McLaughlin Group, Buchanan was at it again, claiming that immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would  “lead to the erasure of the southern border of the United States” and the creation of an “entirely different U.S.A.” because of increased Latino voting in border states.

“Let me tell you, if you get amnesty and the path to citizenship that the Mexican president wants, that will lead to the erasure of the southern border of the United States, because the Hispanic population in all those border states is going to be decisive in elections and they will begin to demand that to people, shut up about immigration and let it come forward, and when that happens you’re going to have an entirely different U.S.A.,” he said.
 

Former congressman and anti-immigrant activist Tom Tancredo took to WorldNetDaily on Friday to warn that Americans are a “vanishing breed” who might “disappear” as a result of multiculturalism in the public school system. He said that progressive are using schools to make Americans “worship at the shrine of multiculturalism” and consequently lose their American identity.

Tancredo backs up his argument with a Benjamin Franklin quote which he says illustrates that Americans have become a “fundamentally different people.”

Unfortunately for Tancredo, the quote actually isn’t from Franklin himself, but the character Benjamin Franklin in the musical “1776.”

America as a continent, a region and as a political entity may well survive for centuries, but the American who has created and populated this nation is a vanishing breed. Is it possible for America to survive while Americans disappear?

Yes, it is possible. As our character and culture change, we become a different nation, like an alien being taking over a human body. It looks the same, but the soul is different. As what it means to be an American changes, we are justified in wondering whether the nation’s Founding Fathers – or Alexis de Tocqueville or Teddy Roosevelt – would recognize the new Americans who celebrate not a special American identity and American destiny but our “common humanity” and “oneness” with the world’s collective misery.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to speak of Americans as a new people who required a new nation. For Franklin, what propelled Americans toward independence was not the Stamp Act or the Tea Tax or the quartering of British troops in the homes of colonists. America was destined to be a separate nation because we were a new people on the face of the earth.

In 1776, a fellow Pennsylvanian, John Dickinson, asked Franklin, who had been an early advocate for independence, exactly why the colonies should separate from the mother country. Franklin replied:

“We have spawned a new race here in America. It’s rougher, simpler, more violent, more entrepreneurial, and less refined. … We require a new nation.”

Benjamin Franklin understood that Americans were a fundamentally different people, a new people in the history of the world. Thus, to Franklin, independence from England was both natural and inevitable.

…

Can a nation remain exceptional if it evolves into a mirror image of the old world, the corrupt and tyrannical world from which its early immigrants sought refuge? How much accommodation and compromise can a nation endure without losing its special character and becoming, in modern jargon, “part of the problem, not part of the solution”?

This is a new question Americans never before had to ask. For 200 years, Americans took our special mission for granted, and fortunately, so did the rest of the world. We were Ronald Reagan’s “City on a hill,” and we were proud of it.

The new question for Americans in the 21st century is whether we even want to be a distinct race and a distinct nation, a beacon of light in the darkness. The question has become, not whether we have lost that quality that made us different but whether we should care one way or the other.

This doubt and this questioning of our place in the world is the cumulative product of three generations of progressive education of our elites. Beginning in the mid-20th century, our schools began teaching the devaluation of our history and doubt about our character as a different kind of nation.

Our new progressive culture asks us to worship at the shrine of multiculturalism, where “American Exceptionalism” is cast into what Marx called the “dustbin of history.”

America maintained its exceptionalism for 200 years because it attracted a special kind of immigrant as well, people similar in spirit to the first colonists – individuals drawn to the promise of Franklin’s entrepreneurial individualism. They didn’t come just for employment and with the intention of sending a third of their earnings back home and then returning there some day. They came wanting to be not laborers, but Americans.

Ronald Reagan was an optimist on the question of America’s destiny, and many conservatives still echo that optimism. Yet, the case for a weary pessimism grows stronger each day.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the driving force behind draconian anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and Alabama and a rising national figure on the Right, is close to a major victory on one of his other pet projects – gaining attention for the mythical problem of “election fraud.”

Kansas’ legislature is poised to grant Kobach’s office the power to prosecute election fraud cases that it identifies, a responsibility previously reserved for county and federal prosecutors. Kobach claims that prosecutors and the state attorney general’s office are neglecting these cases because of “a very full plate.”

But a look at even a few of the cases Kobach claims that prosecutors are neglecting tells a very different story. In February, Kobach told The Topeka Capital-Journal that he had referred eleven “slam dunk” cases to prosecutors, none of which had ended in convictions. But one of the prosecutors responsible for following up on those cases found that most were isolated incidents involving people who were just confused about the voting laws:

Johnson County District Attorney Stephen Howe took exception to some of Kobach's characterizations in his testimony on behalf of the Kansas County and District Attorneys Association. Howe said Kobach's bird’s-eye view of widespread voter fraud crumbles when investigated by those on the ground.

For instance, Howe said one double-voter his office investigated was an elderly man showing "the early stages of dementia." Howe's office notified the man's family rather than prosecute him.

Another alleged double voter was a developmentally disabled man.

“Are we supposed to prosecute that case?" Howe asked. "I chose not to.”

This fits with the pattern. In 2011, Kobach claimed that there had been 221 incidents of voter fraud in Kansas between 1997 and 2010. Yet just seven of these resulted in convictions.

Kobach now claims that he has identified at least 30 cases of illegal double voting in the 2012 election by finding people with the same name and birthdate who voted in two separate states. Such matching tactics have in the past have resulted not in legitimate voter fraud convictions, but in embarrassing errors and mass wrongful disenfranchisement.

Kobach’s issue with the state’s prosecutors seems to be not that they haven’t properly investigated voter fraud – but that they have failed to promote the conspiracy theory about widespread voter fraud that, when it becomes popular, benefits people like Kris Kobach and the policies they pursue.
 

Rep. Steve Palazzo (R-MS) has been working with the Family Research Council to defeat efforts to allow gays under the age of 18 into the Boy Scouts and appeared yesterday on FRC’s “Stand With Scouts Sunday” webcast. The congressman said he would do anything he could “to protect the Boy Scouts from this popular culture, this liberal agenda that is being crammed down their throat,” arguing that “the Boy Scouts are actually being bullied worse than any group or organization that has ever been bullied before.”

“They are being harassed and at the end of the day they are also being ridiculed by some in the liberal media,” he added. Palazzo asked if America cannot tell the Boy Scouts to “stand strong” and preserve its ban on gay members, “then what do we stand for as a country?”

Later, Palazzo said that the organization must “remove the agitators who are trying to corrupt the Boy Scouts of America and bend to popular culture.”

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Last week, we reported on the creative and constitutionally questionable efforts by Iowa Republicans to punish the state supreme court justices who issued the state’s landmark marriage equality ruling.

Now, Wisconsin Republicans are up to something similar, seeking to strip county circuit court judges of the ability to issue preliminary injunctions on laws that may be unconstitutional. The measure, which was introduced last month and had public hearings yesterday, is widely seen as a reaction to judicial injunctions on efforts by state Republicans to impose voter ID requirements and limit collective bargaining rights.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explains:

With some of their major legislative achievements thwarted by trial courts in the past two years, Wisconsin Republicans have been looking for ways to rein in local judges, particularly in liberal areas such as Dane County.

Since 2011, circuit court judges have blocked all or parts of laws backed by Republicans that required voters to show photo ID at the polls, limited collective bargaining for public employees and expanded the governor's power over administrative rules. Under a measure announced last month, such injunctions would be automatically stayed as soon as they were appealed - meaning laws that were blocked would be put back in effect until a higher court issued a ruling.

The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Council is now warning that the bill is likely unconstitutional.

Incidentally, one of the bill’s sponsors is state Sen. Glenn Grothman, who last year tried to get a state public health agency to list single parenthood listed as “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.”
 

President Obama is traveling to Mexico this week to advocate for increased trade ties and cooperation on border enforcement with Mexico in advance of his push for comprehensive immigration reform. But in an interview with Steve Malzberg yesterday, Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King said that Obama is actually in Mexico to “undermine national sovereignty and rule of law” by delivering a “greeting card” to Mexican nationals previously deported from the United States and telling them to “come back and try again.”

King was referring to a provision of the Senate bipartisan immigration reform proposal that would allow some people previously deported for non-criminal reasons to reapply for U.S. residency. Going further, he called the president’s trip “completely outrageous” and accused Republican immigration reform supporters of being “complicit” in the president’s scheme.

King also falsely claimed the bill would provide “instantaneous amnesty” to undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.

Malzberg: Let me ask you, since there’s nobody more active on the immigration than you, and the president of course is in Mexico, and he’s going to give his, you know, his immigration presidential stump speech down in Mexico. To me, that is so inappropriate, it just reeks of inappropriateness. What can we anticipate in his campaign to, again, push for comprehensive immigration reform down in Mexico?

King: Oh my, you know, if you read the bill, the 834-page bill, I think what the president will be doing is already written into the bill. We know that it grants instantaneous amnesty to everybody that’s in the United States illegally, with some exceptions that perhaps will materialize due to law enforcement over time. But it also, in the bill, it invites everybody who has been deported in the past to reapply to come back into the United States, it says, ‘We didn’t mean it.’

So here’s the president down in Mexico, he’s the one that’s essentially carrying the greeting card. Presumably there are people in Mexico who have been deported, he’s down there as president saying, ‘We’re going to legalize everyone that’s in America and if you’ve been deported, come back and try again, we may be able to let you back into the United States.’ I think you’ll hear that from him. This is just, it’s completely outrageous to think that a president would undermine national sovereignty and rule of law that way, and not have the utter outrage of all of Congress lined up against him. And he doesn’t even have the utter outrage of all Republicans lined up against him, because some of them are complicit.

Concerned Women for America’s Janice Shaw Crouse is very concerned about a new Census Bureau report finding a spike in births to unmarried mothers. In an American Thinker column today, Crouse accuses “liberals, progressives, feminists and welfare advocates” of responding to “problems associated by the triad of out-of-wedlock childbearing, single motherhood, and child poverty” by promoting “abortion and increased welfare dependency.” The failure of these policies, she claims, “is obvious to anyone who will face the realities that are evident should one take a risky drive into certain neighborhoods of our cities.”

The founding fathers, she continues, “would roll over in their graves” to see that the country has become “mired in reckless self-indulgence and thus regressed in terms of people's well being.”

For decades, liberals, progressives, feminists and welfare advocates have tried to get to the bottom of the problems associated by the triad of out-of-wedlock childbearing, single motherhood, and child poverty.  Heretofore, the solutions have been abortion and increased welfare dependency. I don't need to ask, "How is that working for us?" The answer is obvious to anyone who will face the realities that are evident should one take a risky drive into certain neighborhoods of our cities or choose the safer route of reading about the dramatic increases in non-marital births documented in the SECCUM report.

The nation's founding fathers first instituted a national census so that the nation could "mark the progress of society."  They would roll over in their graves to see that the nation they founded with great hope and based on principles of personal and civic responsibility, instead of progressing, has instead become mired in reckless self-indulgence and thus regressed in terms of people's well being.  We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the past four decades trying to alleviate the consequences of poor and irresponsible choices only to reap a harvest of greater dependency than ever before and several generations of children at risk for all the negative outcomes that parents hope to avoid (truancy, delinquency, substance abuse, etc). It is not merely the demographics of non-marital child bearing that need to be publicized but an honest, extensive reporting of the damages as well.

When the sum total of our morality, both personal and public, consists of not being judgmental, we should not be surprised to find that there is little will to be concerned with more than the pursuit of whatever brings a moment of pleasure today with no regard for the effects this will have for anyone's well-being tomorrow.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a leading anti-immigrant group that was invited to testify at last month’s Senate immigration reform hearings, has been making it very clear why it opposes comprehensive reform. In an interview last week, CIS director Mark Krikorian said that Republicans shouldn’t bother courting Latino voters or “importing more of them” through immigration reform because “generally speaking, Hispanic voters are Democrats.”

In an interview yesterday with VCY America’s Jim Schneider, the group’s research director Steven Camarota, piled on, calling GOP supporters of immigration reform “useful idiots” who “have no idea of the political preferences of the people who they’re trying to turn into voters.” 

Schneider: I think it’s Politico, this week Monday, talked about this mega GOP donor, Paul Singer, making a six-figure donation to a group that’s involved with marshaling conservatives to support an overhaul of our federal laws on this issue. I mean, is there, it sounds like there’s tons of pressure that’s going on legislators at this time.

Camarota: Yeah, well, you know, what did Lenin, the leader of the Soviet revolution say, ‘There’s a lot of…the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him.’ Well, you know, there’s just a…and he also talked about the concept of ‘useful idiots.’ These are people who help you inadvertently with your revolution. Well, that’s kind of a harsh statement but the reality is there are lots of conservatives who never actually looked at the voting data, who have no idea of the political preferences of the people who they’re trying to turn into voters.

And so, when you press them on this, a lot of times they’ll say, well, ‘I didn’t know,’ or, ‘We’ll fix that, somehow we’ll change their minds,’ as if they were malleable piece of clay and not human beings entitled to their own opinions. The fact is that if immigration continues, the United States will continue to move in a more left or progressive direction. That’s not necessarily bad or good, but it is a fact, because the new immigrants and their children, based on all the polling that we have, tend to favor expansive government. Again, in a democracy, you change the voters, the political system has to respond. That’s just the reality of the situation.

Elsewhere in the interview, Camarota went all out on the racial dog whistles, taking on Attorney General Eric Holder’s defense of the civil rights of immigrants and non-English speakers. “Unfortunately, there’s a whole industry designed to balkanize the country and remind people of their backgrounds and ethnicity and their race,” Camarota said. “And there’s a lot of what you might call ‘professional ethnics’ out there whose job it is to keep the country divided.” This "identity and grievance politics," he adds, is “one of the downsides of immigration in modern America.”

Schneider: He also used this term, ‘language minorities,’ and that sounded rather peculiar to me. Can you define, what is he meaning by ‘language minorities?’

Camarota: Well, this is something that’s evolved since the 1960s, not surprisingly, that if you don’t speak English you’re entitled to certain protections, including things like have voting ballots printed up in your language. Now, of course, a moment’s reflection reveals that basically that makes no sense. Because when you naturalize, when a legal immigrant becomes a full citizen of the United States, they have to display a knowledge of English, so they should be able to read English. And people born in the United States should also be able to have learned English. They lived here, they grew up here.

So who exactly are these foreign language battles for? Well, what it’s for is to preserve ethnic identity. And unfortunately, there’s a whole industry designed to balkanize the country and remind people of their backgrounds and ethnicity and their race. And there’s a lot of what you might call ‘professional ethnics’ out there whose job it is to keep the country divided, because if people assimilate, well, they have no one they can claim to represent. And that’s one of the downsides of immigration in modern America, identity and grievance politics.