More Latinos in professions educates U.S.

It seems to have been a common theme expressed by President Barack Obama’s cabinet members who appeared at the National Council of La Raza’s recent convention held in Chicago – we need more Latinos in the professions.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who once was head of the Chicago Public Schools, made remarks about how much better off we’d be if there were more Latinos working as school teachers.

HIS COMMENTS CAME a couple of days after Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said she thinks significant health care reform in this country needs more Latinos working as doctors, nurses and other health care professionals.

The idea both expressed is that the quality of health care and education would improve by having more doctors and teachers, and that the growing Latino population is going to feel more comfortable about receiving medical treatment and going to school if they see “some of our own” in charge.

But I’m inclined to think there’s another benefit, one that both barely touched upon.

I think we need to have more Latinos in positions of significance largely to show the nativist halfwits of our society that it is not absurd to have Latinos in positions of significance.

IN FACT, IT probably will do the world some good to see Latinos around to just become a part of the landscape of society.

For those people who say they resent having to take ethnicity into account because they want to be “blind” to color, this is how it is achieved. Make it so that the idea of Latinos (or any group) as a doctor or a teacher or anything else is such a common occurrence that it doesn’t strike anyone as odd.

That is the day we will achieve a “color blind” society, not when we focus on issues that try to ignore that certain groups of people exist in our society. That’s not being “color blind,” it is being blind to color. (And I’m sure many people have used that line in the past, so I don’t want to hear from anyone claiming plagiarism, as cliches can’t truly be plagiarized).

But it becomes easy for people to be “blind” to color when there isn’t much of it. Duncan says that despite the fact that about one-fifth of all public school students are Latino, only about one-twentieth of their teachers are.

THE HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONS experience a similar trend, where Latinos are more likely than others to be impacted by the whole desire to reform the way in which people are insured because about one in three of every uninsured person is of a Latino ethnic background.

Even for those of us who have adequate health insurance, it is not unheard of for us to know people do not. That is a situation that many in our society need to be better informed about.

In fact, there are times when I feel like my life has become an education experience in and of itself. Letting the masses know that Latinos are not limited to being the hired help is something I often keep in mind.

There have been occasions when the thought that my bad behavior would have consequences by feeding the negative misperceptions held by nitwits was enough to discourage me from doing something improper.

EVEN IN MAINTAINING this weblog and in my work as a writer, I have often seen my greater purpose as trying to explain the thought process (and occasionally the variety of thought) felt by the Latino population in this country.

If it sounds like I view myself as trying to educate Anglos about us every time I sit down to write, there is some of that in my work. To the degree that Duncan and Solis pushed for more Latino professionals, it would seem that they also are touting the idea of increased education of the masses.

It’s just too bad that Republican officials made a point of deliberately ignoring the La Raza convention held in Chicago.

For by doing so, they managed to keep themselves just a little bit ignorant of the growing number of Latinos. That ignorance is ultimately going to be their downfall.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Barack Obama’s cabinet members used the recent National Council of LaRaza convention (http://educationfrontblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/07/arne-duncans-right-we-need-mor.html) held in Chicago to tout the need for Latinos to be involved more (http://nwitimes.com/news/local/illinois/article_18b3e253-43e2-5ea3-a110-92354cf604da.html) in society.

The one-time Party of Lincoln didn’t want to show up at La Raza’s event held in the one-time (http://www.americablog.com/2009/07/la-raza-smacks-gop-leaders-for-blowing.html) president’s home state.

Latinos or guns, it’s all about partisan politics

It appears the bulk of the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate will now scramble to come up with their excuse for why they can’t back Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Just on Wednesday it was learned that two more senators of the GOP persuasion said they will vote against the lady from the Bronx – Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas and David Vitter of Louisiana.

BOTH OF THEM said they had their problems with the way Sotomayor perceives the issue of personal ownership of firearms. Apparently, she might actually support the idea that unrestricted gun ownership is absurd – and was never the intent of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

It doesn’t shock me to learn these two, or the bulk of the GOP caucus, will formally oppose Sotomayor. They know it is highly unlikely they can defeat her, but they want to be on the record as opposing her anyway.

It’s all about the partisan politics and the voters back home.

Many of these senators come from places where the thought of being perceived as hostile toward the interests of the growing Latino population will not be perceived as a negative.

EVEN IN A place like Texas, it might be possible for Hutchinson to bank on the idea that the Anglo population can outvote the Latino one. But she had better be able to dominate that Anglo population for such a strategy to work.

I guess appealing to the “gun-nuts” of our society is her way of trying to ensure she takes the bulk of the vote.

Actually, it is a deliberate move on her part, because the National Rifle Association has said it opposes Sotomayor because they don’t trust her to support their concept of what gun laws ought to be.

They also have said that when they compile their grades that rank the political performance of senators (which are used by some lawmakers in trying to gain support from their local voters), the Sotomayor vote will be a biggie.

IN SHORT, THEY’RE going to dump on political people who won’t vote “no” on Sotomayor.

Now to lawmakers who come from areas where the NRA has little influence (and may even be seen as a harmful factor in our society), they can get away with ignoring such a threat.

Getting an “F” (or a ranking below 60 percent, I forget how the NRA actually lists its data) from the gun group may even be seen as a badge of honor.

But from the lawmakers who have built their political reputations on being supportive of the NRA and the people of this country who are inclined to look favorably upon them, this becomes a serious threat.

I’M SURE THERE are some people who think that voting to support Sotomayor for the Supreme Court could wind up costing them votes come Election Day 2010. I’m sure any sense they would be doing the right thing just isn’t worth it to them.

And I’m sure many of these government officials see the Latino populations in their communities as being too marginal to care about.

The problem is that such an attitude is a mistake, because of the way the population is growing. It is no longer a group of ethnicities that congregate in California, Texas and Miami, with a few more in New York and Chicago.

What always strikes me whenever I see studies about the population trends of Latinos in this country is that every single part of the country is showing an increase – even those rural places that I’m sure the social conservatives would like to think have no Latino population base to speak of.

WHICH MEANS THAT taking a negative vote on Sotomayor (who despite being of Puerto Rican ethnicity has gained the admiration of all the ethnic groups that comprise modern-day Latinos) is also a politically risky move.

There already are those who are wondering if Hutchinson is killing her desire to be Texas governor by saying she will take a vote that would be opposed by about one-third of her home state’s population.

And it also runs the risk of dragging down someone’s legacy, which always is a concern for political people, who would rather be forgotten than remembered as a twit.

Does this come off as having the potential to provide more anecdotal evidence to people that the Republican Party is determined to oppose the interests of Latinos? If so, I don’t want to hear the crying from conservative political pundits who can’t fathom why the Latino population is turning so heavily toward the Democratic Party, despite that party’s at times lackluster performance on issues of our concern.

IT ALMOST SEEMS like this issue is becoming one where political people pick between the NRA or the Latinos. And for those political people who choose the guns, all I can say is, you made your bed.

Now lie in it on future election days.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: It will be interesting to see how opposing Sonia Sotomayor translates, both (http://hutchison.senate.gov/hindex.html) literally and culturally.

Sotomayor support not the least bit surprising

Is Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., destined to be remembered as a Republican turncoat, or will history note him as one of the few sensible political people on Capitol Hill?

The Senate’s judiciary committee on Tuesday took its vote with regards to appeals court Justice Sonia Sotomayor becoming a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. As expected, a majority of that committee voted to support her.

SO NOW, IT is up to the full Senate to vote to confirm or reject her, and they are expected to act some time next week just before they leave the District of Columbia for their annual month-long summer break.

As also expected, the judiciary committee voted largely along partisan political lines. It was a 13-6 vote, with all 12 Democrats and Graham of the GOP deciding that Sotomayor is worthy of a seat on the nation’s high court.

The rest of the Republican minority on that committee played political games and voted to reject Sotomayor.

No one ever expected the judiciary committee to reject Sotomayor, just like no one expects Sotomayor to fail to get the full Senate’s approval for the Supreme Court post.

BUT IT OUGHT to be plain to everybody that this has become a partisan issue.

The people who are bitter that someone like Barack Obama could win a presidential election and be in a position to make appointments to the Supreme Court are going to use their positions to make symbolic statements and gestures in opposition to him.

When people like Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says he found “too many unresolved conflicts” and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, says he thinks Sotomayor is not “capable of wearing the judicial blindfold,” it is empty political rhetoric.

These were people who had no problem when a president of their ideological persuasion was making appointments to the high court. But now, they don’t want to go along with the new administration.

IN PART, THIS is understandable. If it were a “President McCain” in a position to make this Supreme Court appointment, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find significant opposition among the Democratic majority of Congress to just about anyone he would have nominated.

Which is why I have to admit to gaining a little bit of respect for Graham, who on Tuesday made it clear he’s not enthused about an Obama choice.

But he realizes that anyone this president is going to pick is going to have a similar view of the world. It is ridiculous to expect Obama to choose anyone else.

Or, as Graham put it, “I didn’t feel good about the election, but we lost.”

AS HE SAID it, “I feel good about Judge Sotomayor. What she will do as a judge I think will be based on what she thinks is right. I haven’t seen this activism that we should all dread and reject.”

I’m sure that such rhetoric will cause some of his political colleagues to resent him. Perhaps they will even try retribution in the future.

But I can’t help but think that the long-term future will remember him more fondly because he’s not willing to put that blind faith ideological belief over all when it comes to picking a new justice for the Supreme Court.

Too many of the people who are getting all worked up over the presence of Sotomayor these days are the ones who seem to have a hang-up with the idea that Latinos comprise a growing portion of our society.

SOTOMAYOR SITTING ON that court will be physical evidence that just can’t be ignored, even though I often get the sense that when they talk about wanting a color-blind society, what they want is a society that is blind to people who are “of color.”

Personally, I think that we ought to have a Supreme Court that consists of legal minds chosen by presidents of differing backgrounds and ideological beliefs. That is how we are most likely to get a mixture of justices that comes close to representing the combination of people that comprises the United States.

And if that sounds like I’m saying that people who want the court stacked with justices who only represent their viewpoint on issues are somehow wrong, then so be it.

I can’t help but think that such talk sounds downright “un-American.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The social conservatives are probably upset that Sonia Sotomayor, despite their hardcore opposition, will go down in history as getting more support (http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2009/07/sotomayor_judicary_approves_ju.html) from the Senate than did Clarence Thomas.

Did Obama screw up, or was the cop stupid?

It appears we’re now getting involved in the political fiasco that arose when a Harvard University professor who is black got arrested outside his own home when a Cambridge, Mass., police officer thought he was trying to break in.

He was, actually. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had managed to lock himself out of his house, and was trying to get back in when a cop saw him.

NOW I WASN’T there, so I don’t know exactly what was said between the two men that led the cop to arrest the professor, although I can’t help but think that if a police officer approached me on my property and started asking questions about what I was doing there, my initial (and justified) response would be to tell him something along the lines of “none of your business.”

As we all know, President Barack Obama got himself into the mess when he was asked about it, and made it clear he sided with the professor. That has the conservatives in Congress upset, and they’re considering one of those purely symbolic resolutions condemning the president for not taking the side of law enforcement.

It’s not like passing such a resolution would penalize the president in any significant way. But it would give the conservative zealots something they could latch onto as a way of lambasting a president that probably 99.99999 percent of them didn’t vote for.

(And as for the 0.00001 percent who did, they’re probably related to those folks from Palm Beach County, Fla., who inadvertently cast ballots for Pat Buchanan back in 2000).

SO HOW ARE we Latinos involved?

It turns out that the National Latino Officers Association has come out with its own statement (which is the group’s right, remember Freedom of Expression?)

They say Obama is “100 percent right” on the issue and that the Cambridge police officer, who they note is a sensitivity instructor for the other officers in his department, “acted stupidly.”

They say that trying to perceive this issue in any way that puts the police in a positive light is merely little more than trying to ignore the realities of police treatment of individuals who are not Anglo enough for their sensibilities.

NOW AS I have written here before, I’m not about to lambaste all police officers with this commentary. Some officers truly try to serve the public good, while others are mere thugs (and most are merely average individuals trying to do a complex job without getting themselves or someone else killed).

Some departments are aware of the need to be sensitive to the changing population of our society, while others are wedded so thorough to old-school ways of thought that they are just as much a part of the problem as anyone else in our society.

“It is long overdue that law enforcement practices be more closely scrutinized for civil rights violations,” the association said in its statement defending the president.

As I wrote earlier in this commentary, I am inclined to think favorably of Gates because I can understand why someone would think he is somehow safe from abuse on his own property.

HE MIGHT VERY well think that such a place is the one where he can dictate the terms of what goes on there and how he is treated.

For those people who say that Gates should somehow have been realistic and merely complied with police, I have to wonder how many of them would have reacted if they had been confronted with the identical situation.

Particularly if they were of the ideological bent that would make them socially conservative, they would probably think it is their right to be left alone. Does this mean they think the police should leave them alone if they are doing nothing wrong, but they can harass anyone else?

That’s how it winds up coming across to hear the people who are so determined to stick up for the Cambridge Cops these days.

THEN I HAVE to think to a situation I once experienced, and have to realize how lucky I was not to wind up in a similar situation.

It was back in the early 1990s when then-President George Bush (the elder) made an appearance at a forest preserve in the Chicago suburbs. I was there as a reporter-type person for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago to cover the event.

There was just one problem. I managed to lock my keys inside my car, which was in a muddy field with so much security surrounding the president that my every move was watched.

I often tell this story in a humorous vein – it is the time that a local cop broke into my car with assistance from the Secret Service so that I could leave when the event was over.

BUT WHAT WOULD have happened had that local cop decided he didn’t want to believe me that it really was my car. Could I have been arrested for trying to “steal” my own automobile, and wound up having to use my “one phone call” to call in the story from jail, then ask my editor for a few hundred bucks bail?

And how long would the managing editor of the old City News have left me there before finally helping me to get out? I’m glad I’ll never know for sure.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: An association representing Latinos in law enforcement is siding (http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a901b092a900bac7a93f8b3b0bf39a9c) with the president over their “profession” with regards to the latest controversy related to racial and ethnic profiling by police.

“Latino” vs. “Hispanic” – What does founding “mother” have to say?

So much for the long-held theory that it was Richard Nixon’s fault. It turns out that a mid-level assistant in the then-Department of Health, Education and Welfare is willing to take credit for coming up with the term “Hispanic,” and she still prefers it to Latino.”

I stumbled across an interview published recently by the Washington Post with Grace Flores-Hughes, who says the term came about because GOP officials who then ran government were uncomfortable with a study about what we would now call Latinos and Native Americans.

WHY?

Because it made reference to Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans and so many other ethnic groups that they found it confusing. The powers-that-be of federal government back in the early 1970s insisted there had to be a single term to refer to all these different people.

That is how the feds came up with “Hispanic,” which Flores-Hughes told the Post she still thinks is the most accurate. She says that “Latino,” if interpreted literally, could also include people from Italy and from countries around the Mediterranean Sea.

Whereas she was trying to help come up with the term that best described people like her – those from South Texas whose ethnic origins lay in Mexico or some other country on the American continents that was once a Spanish colony.

FOR A FEDERAL bureaucrat, I have to admit that Flores-Hughes is rather open-minded. She told the Post she has no problem with the way the Census Bureau will imply next year that “Hispanic” is the preferred term, but that “Latino” or other terms can also mean the same thing.

She doesn’t want anyone to not be counted just because someone was being rigid about sticking to one term.

The whole “Hispanic/Latino” debate has always included overtones of despising Richard Nixon. The belief was that he somehow single-handedly imposed a term on us to describe us, regardless of what we might have thought about the best way to describe ourselves.

Flores-Hughes says Nixon himself was way too busy to be bothered. Which is true. He was still trying to salvage something out of the mess that had become the Vietnam War, and he was gearing up for the re-election campaign of ’72 that we now know was conducted by aides who viewed the re-election of Nixon as something resembling a crusade and were willing to use tactics more commonly associated with international espionage in their effort to beat the Democratic Party opposition.

BUT IT DOES strike me as being so typical that someone would decide there just has to be a catch-all label for all these “brown” people, some of whom had their ethnic origins in what is now the United States (in short, they didn’t immigrate – the U.S. came to them, on top of their heads).

They didn’t like having to identify all these ethnic groups separately, even though one can argue that such separate identities is the most accurate way to view the “Latino” population.

Personally, I found it interesting to read that the so-called creator of “Hispanic” stands by her term. And I will agree with her logic to a point that Latino literally can include other people who really don’t fall within the group – while also theoretically excluding people from Spain, which strikes me as the most ridiculous part of the overall debate.

But there are also those same flaws that exist with “Hispanic.” So who’s to say who is correct?

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The origins of “Hispanic” can be found in this light-hearted interview published (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/24/AR2009072402091.html) by the Washington Post.

Oh, what a surprise!

Excuse me for not being particularly worked up over the thought that senators Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Tom Cornyn, R-Texas, plan to remain steadfast and vote “no” when asked to confirm the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Some think it significant in the case of Hatch that he has never opposed a Supreme Court nominee. All it means to me is that the bulk of the Republican faction of Congress sees that it has little to lose among its supporters by opposing the measure.

IT’S NOT LIKE they can really stop her from getting the appointment (I haven’t heard of any significant defections from Democratic senators), so they have nothing to gain by merely going along.

And they will gain the favor of the minions led by Limbaugh, who will now decree them to be “heroes” of sorts, sticking up for their vision of what this country ought to be about – rather than what is actually in the best interest of the nation.

Hatch has a statement where he admits the appeals court justice offers an inspiring life story to our society. But he still can’t back her, even though he never really makes it clear what his hangup is – other than that she might not share his biases in viewing our society.

That’s the best speculation I can come up with.

INSOFAR S CORNYN is concerned, I can’t help but think he is destined to become the next Bob Dornan.

Remember "B-1 Bob?"

He was the Southern California member of Congress who appealed to the conservative white people of what was once his district, only to lose to a Latina when the district changed like so much of the country has.

It’s happening in Texas too. Just about every place that has a substantial city (in short, where people actually live in significant numbers) has become a Democrat-leaning county, along with that whole slew of counties along the southern border with Mexico.

TEXAS COULD BECOME a “blue” state that won’t be so blue when it dumps Cornyn for a Democrat.

I honestly believe that the slew of GOP senators who are playing hardcore and insisting upon voting “no” will wind up besmirching their own legacies. History will remember them as the people who couldn’t “get with the program,” so to speak.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Orrin Hatch can’t bring himself to back (http://www.sltrib.com/ci_12907061?source=most_viewed) Sonia Sotomayor.

Gidget’s a goner, just like the ads should be

When I hear the name “Gidget,” I think of a youthful Sally Field (although some would have the image of Sandra Dee come to mind instead).

Yet the “Gidget” in the news this week was a dog. A Chihuahua to be specific. The Chihuahua that was featured in those silly Taco Bell commercials from the past decade – to be exact.

IT IS TRUE. Gidget the Chihuahua whose image was of the ugly/cute dog that actually liked what passed for food from Taco Bell is dead. She suffered a stroke, and had to be put down. Her owner plans to have her remains cremated.

It was not clear what would become of the ashes – putting them in an urn on display somewhere, or an attempt at dignified scattering.

But what caught my attention about the news coverage of the latest “celebrity” death was the way they recalled the Chihuahua controversy that is the only reason anybody remembers those advertisements for mass-produced burritos and other fast food items that pretend to be inspired by Mexican cuisine.

The following line comes from the Associated Press account that is likely the one that will be published in most newspapers across the United States – “The ads made the Taco Bell mascot wildly popular, although they provoked criticism from activists who accused them of promoting Hispanic stereotypes.”

THAT IS IT.

The rest of their account was about how lovable a dog Gidget was and how she even made a couple of appearances in films, on account of her commercial fame.

We’re taking one of the tackiest advertising symbols of the 1990s and trying to remember it as something cute and cuddly that personifies what we as a society are. That is just selective memory.

Now as must be apparent by now, I don’t think much of the foodstuffs from Taco Bell. I also will confess that I’m not much of a dog-lover, particularly the Chihuahua.

AS FOR THE food, nothing they serve strikes me as being particularly Mexican or even Mexican-like. Their attempt at “seasonings” strike me more as flavorless than anything else.

And as for the people who like to eat their stuff because they sell it individually for prices as low as $0.59 per item (making it possible to pick out a few things and fill up for just a couple of bucks), I’d argue that even those prices are over-inflated for the quality one receives.

So perhaps I would have been biased against anything that Taco Bell did, then or now.

But “yo quiero Taco Bell” in a heavy, Spanish-like accent was just absurd.

THE LINE TICKED off many Latinos not only because those of us with sense “no quiero Taco Bell,” but also because it was some Anglo advertising executive’s attempt to portray these foodstuffs as somehow authentic.

The last thing any self-respecting Mexican would want is to have anybody think that a Taco Bell taco has anything to do with a real taco (a word of advice to the culinary ignorant – if it has cheddar cheese and olives in it, it’s not authentic).

It brings to mind a comic strip by Aaron MacGruder – The Boondocks, when one day, Huey’s friend, Caesar, asks him if any “self-respecting Mexican” would eat Taco Bell food.

In fact, I can remember those of us who would joke (when our senses of humor were tuned more toward morbid) that if the Taco Bell Chihuahua ever actually ate a Taco Bell taco, it would probably be the cause of his death.

NOW THAT GIDGET is actually muerte, it seems wrong to bring that line up.

And in one sense, I’m glad to learn that Gidget lived to the ripe old age (for a dog) of 15, and was able to be pampered and treated like “a prima donna” for her life.

But before we start recalling those absurd ads with a sense of loving and humor, let’s remember what they truly were.

Some Anglo ad executive who didn’t have a clue about Latinos showed us his level of cultural ignorance. It’s basically that simple.

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Nativist “fantasy” not coming true

Oogie, boogie, boo! Scary stuff here. At least if you’re of the nativist ideological bent and were hoping that somehow the tough economic times confronting the U.S. would translate into all those “Mexicans” going back home.

It’s not happening.

THE FEDERAL POLICIES of the George W. Bush era related to immigration are having an effect on lowering the number of people from Mexico who are coming to the United States. But a recently released Pew Hispanic Center study finds there just isn’t much of a chance in the number of Mexicans already in the United States who now feel some desire to return home.

That was the oft expressed thought earlier this year on talk radio and all the other places where the social conservatives who obsess about immigration (rather than abortion or firearms) were claiming.

Since there just weren’t as many jobs, the thought was that many of those people who came from Mexico looking for work would decide to return home.

The Pew study cited Mexican employment statistics claiming that about 433,000 Mexicans returned to Mexico from the United States during 2008. That compares to two years earlier, when the total was about 479,000.

SO THERE ARE actually fewer Mexican nationals (as opposed to Mexican-Americans, who have every right to be in this country, even though some nitwits have trouble telling the difference) returning “home” than there were two years before – although the truth is that the figures are so close that they might as well be identical.

Those figures are much different than the ones for the trip in the opposite direction – 1.03 million Mexicans headed to the United States in 2006, compared to only about 636,000 last year.

Now there is one legitimate reason to focus so much attention on Mexico when it comes to immigration – a large percentage of the newcomers to this country come from there.

Of course, it is a nation that directly borders our own. It would make sense that the bulk of people entering this country would be from our neighbors to the south, and Canada to the north.

THE PEW STUDY points out that 32 percent of all people in the United States who were born in another country were born in Mexico, and 66 percent of all Latin American immigrants to this country come from Mexico.

That’s just fact. The idea that some people see it as a problem relates more to their hang-ups related to ethnicity than anything else.

It also convinces me all the more of the need for serious reform of this nation’s laws with regards to immigration. We have federal policy now that simply refuses to reflect the reality of the world around us.

There also are too many people who, with their desire to erect barricades along the U.S./Mexico border and take steps to militarize the region, are trying to push this nation even further into the warped fantasy world that exists in their minds.

THE FACT IS that the number of people in this country born in Mexico has remained fairly stable in recent years, no matter how many policies people try to enact that are meant to somehow reduce that total.

And when one considers the growth of the native-born Latino population in this country, perhaps it is time for all of us to simply acknowledge the truth – we’re here to stay, largely because we want to work.

No amount of ridiculous policies are going to change that basic fact, and the sooner people quit pushing the concept of exclusion as some sort of ideal, the quicker it will be that the Latino population begins to fully assimilate into the mass of U.S. society.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: There are roughly 11.5 million people living in the United States these days (http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=112) who were born in Mexico.

How worthwhile are ethnic nights at the ballpark?

Here’s hoping that the Toledo Mud Hens of the International League have a more successful Latino Night at the ballpark than did the Gary Southshore Railcats of the Northern League.

The former ballclub (which plays in an Ohio city named for a ciudad en España) is having its “Latino Scholarship Day” on July 26, when they play Scranton-Wilkes Barre (whom no one would fear, except that they are affiliated with the New York Yankees).

FROM THE LOOK of the promotion, part of the proceeds from ticket sales will benefit a scholarship fund. And everybody who goes to the ballgame will get to hear mariachi music in the stands, along with a Latina singing the “Star Spangled Banner” at ballgame’s beginning, and a Latino firefighter of 17 years getting to toss out the first pitch.

It’s a noble cause, and a cute goal of trying to pay tribute to the growing Latino population with a night at the ballpark.

It certainly couldn’t turn out any worse than what happened in Gary, Ind., on June 26 when the team had its now-annual “Latino Family Night.” Not that it was the team’s fault, necessarily.

This year’s event was one of those events that got sabotaged by current events.

IN THIS PARTICULAR case, Michael Jackson died one day before. And he was a native of Gary.

So the ball club felt compelled to acknowledge Jackson during their first home game following his death. Which coincided with Latino Family Night.

The end result was all that Spanish-language music that was supposed to dominate the mood of the evening got scrapped, and the Michael Jackson catalogue of greatest hits was pulled out.

To some of those who attended, it felt more like a Jackson-fest. Not even the thought of low-cost tacos and burritos made up for it.

WHEN I LEARNED of the outcome of the event in Gary, I got my chuckle.

For the honest truth is, just what should we expect of a promotional event at a ballpark?

When it comes to anything Latino, it usually will turn into something Mexican only because the sight of a mariachi band is colorful enough, and there’s always a chance they will stick to the half-dozen or so songs (Cielito Lindo, Guadalajara, Besame Mucho, to name a few) that even Anglos will have heard of – even if they don’t know the proper song titles or lyrics.

It’s more about creating an atmosphere that doesn’t make anyone feel uncomfortable, rather than trying to recreate the concept of Latin America in the ballpark.

BESIDES, IF ONE really wants to experience Latin America in baseball, all they really have to do is look down on that playing field.

The lowest levels of the minor leagues will usually feature many Latin American ballplayers (because they come cheap, compared to the bonuses that U.S.-born athletes have come to expect upon signing professional sports contracts).

And as the quality of play increases with the level of professional baseball, so do the abilities of those Latinos.

It’s to the point where every day ought to be considered “Latino Night” at the ballpark just because of the way Latin American and Latino athletes are improving the overall quality of play.

THINK ABOUT IT.

If not for the heavy influx of Latin America (about 40 percent of major league ballplayers these days are from Latin American nations or are U.S.-born of Latino descent), there’s a very good chance that baseball would be yet another aspect of society in which the Japanese had managed to surpass this country.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: What kind of fluke could take down the Toledo Mud Hens’ attempt at Latino Night (http://www.laprensatoledo.com/Stories/2009/072409/MudHens.htm) the way that Michael Jackson altered a similar event (http://nwitimes.com/news/foreign-language/article_e4bbe628-4e9e-5d55-9e60-898d345d1390.html) in Gary, Ind.?

Telling a nut that she’s nuts is just downright nuts

“I think Latina women are, I mean, it depends on the woman, but I think they are very, they have great judgment, but there are some that are just nuts. I’m just saying.”

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I have to confess. My knowledge of pop culture is somewhat limited, and part of it is that I am a snob.

So when I first learned that David Arquette made a wisecrack on national television about Latinas being “nuts,” my first reaction was to think, “Who?” I had to “look it up,” so to speak, before I could figure out exactly who was speaking out on this issue of great significance to our society (heavy sarcasm is definitely intended here).

UPON LEARNING THAT “Mr. Courtney Cox” had a thought on this issue, my next reaction was to think, “Who cares?” He just didn’t seem significant enough to get worked up over. In fact, the only surprise I had was that the Fox News Channel would have ever put him on the air to talk about issues.

I would have thought they would have viewed him as part of the “Hollywood liberal elite” that they always want to rant and rage about – that is, when they’re not having commentators complain about all those Mexican foreigners slipping across the border into the United States.

But now I hear that Arquette got hit with enough criticism that he feels the need to say he’s sorry for speaking as though he ought to fit in with the nitwits who populate the programming log for the Fox news operation.

He says he “loves and respects” Latinas, and all women, for that matter.

WE EVEN GOT to hear about a woman he has worked with in a food pantry in the suburbs of Los Angeles who he calls his “personal hero” for having worked at a particular pantry for nearly three full decades.

Arquette has turned this woman into a cause celebre for some. Somehow, I don’t think she’s going to think much about her newfound fame (perhaps Hollywood tour buses will now make the trip up to Venice, Calif., and pass by her food pantry as a tour guide uses an awful-sounding P.A. system to point her out).

I just think this controversy was ridiculous to start with, and that it has escalated with his lame attempt at an apology. I’d have more respect for him if he were to just confess that he suffered from “diarrhea of the mouth” while on television, and that he won’t do or say anything equally stupid again.

Instead, he tries to make the “noble statement” that somehow just comes off as geeky.

HOW ELSE TO explain the idea that when asked questions about the qualifications of Sonia Sotomayor for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, Arquette goes off on a rant about Latinas being nuts.

Perhaps this is a case of the nut calling the nuts nutty? Having such a thought pop into one’s head at that moment is the only thing that is truly nuts.

And even if Arquette for those couple of seconds seriously did believe that Latinas are “nuts,” I wonder about the logic of someone who would seriously express that thought.

Do you really want to say publicly that someone is “nuts” if you really believe they are nuts? It would seem to me to be inviting the likelihood of retaliation.

AFTER ALL, PEOPLE who are nuts might very well try some irrational act to get back at you for talking too much. And there are irrational types in just about every group who would try to prove the comment true.

Hopefully, we can put this controversy to rest, and I can go back to not paying any attention to David Arquette. And perhaps as his ultimate punishment, his wife ought to revert back to playing her most famed character, “Monica” (the non-blonde) from the now-cancelled television show “Friends.”

One week of having to live with a Monica-like anal-retentive character around the house ought to teach him to think before he speaks.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: It was supposed to be a moment promoting the idea of feeding the hungry (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=43936#ixzz0LqIagOGK) who exist in this country.

Minority firefighters issue far from resolved

I can sense the confusion being stirrup up in the minds of the social conservatives of this country who thought they had achieved “victory” when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of white firefighters who claim they were deprived of promotions because of a municipality concerned about its minority-hiring record.

Now they have to endure news reports out of the Denver suburb of Aurora that contend the municipality faces a federal investigation because it has too many white firefighters and police officers.

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S civil rights division says it is going to look at the suburb’s hiring practices because the percentages of firefighters who are not white just seem way too low to be believable.

That is to say, no one of sense seriously believes that a fire or police department that is hiring the best qualified people available is going to find that high a percentage of white people who are truly superior to everybody else who is interested in obtaining a job in maintaining the public safety.

Of course, too much of the debate on these issues is done by people who seem to lack sense.

Hence, there is criticism of the fact that anyone wants to look into Aurora’s policies.

THEY WANT TO claim that the “tests” used to weed people out when considering those for police and fire jobs and promotions are somehow balanced enough that the fact that so many public safety employees turn out to be white guys must merely be evidence they were the best qualified.

In the case of New Haven, Conn. (the municipality whose efforts to ignore test results they believed were flawed ultimately got them slapped on the wrist by the Supreme Court), that case would up getting a high court opinion that appears to be partisan in and of itself.

Is this the kind of case where a future Supreme Court will wind up issuing an opinion that overturns the result? That would appear to be the case. Because many people are operating under the assumption that nothing truly has changed.

In Aurora, officials are wondering just how they created a system that turned out so many white guys for fire and police department positions.

HOW BAD IS it?

The Denver Post newspaper on Sunday reported that about 80 percent of Aurora’s firefighters and 85.3 percent of their police officers are white.

Police Chief Dan Oates told the newspaper that he’s not opposed to cooperating with the Justice Department investigation, because he’s hoping it will give him a clue what has to be done in order to boost the numbers of police officers who come from backgrounds other than Anglo.

That ultimately is in line with what I see across the country when it comes to public safety agencies – some seem to have a clue that having a workforce that is representative of the community as it actually is does help when it comes to doing a better job.

THINKING IT IS acceptable to have a fire or police department that represents someone’s ideal of what they’d like their community to look like winds up being an impediment to the public safety, mainly because it is an agency that will not have the trust of the entire public population in the event of a crisis situation.

Any test results that wind up putting together a police or fire department that does not represent a community ought to be seen as evidence of flawed testing.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: One Denver suburb is willing to be investigated by the federal government for civil rights violations in police and fire hiring, out of hopes that it will (http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_12868495) give them a clue how to bolster their ranks with more Latino and black officers.

Sotomayor critics living in the past

Perhaps it is the “freedom” they feel of knowing that they can’t stop federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor from being confirmed some time next month to a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Knowing they’re going to lose is letting the Republican senators who consider themselves the mainstream of the modern-day GOP take a hard-core vote of “no” when it comes to the judge from the Bronx.

I COULD NOT help but pick up that impression upon learning that the week of Sotomayor testimony ended with a few Republican members of Congress deciding they can now back her.

Mel Martinez of Florida (the lone Latino among the Republicans in the Senate), Olympia Snowe of Maine (one of the few women) and Richard Lugar of Indiana (who is the longest-serving GOP senator and almost seems like he’s from the past age where politicos could put aside party differences to reach a consensus).

They are the GOP legislators willing to back Sotomayor.

But the rest of them are digging in to vote “no,” out of hopes that it will gain them praise from High Priest Rush (as in Limbaugh) as he tries to stir up the portion of the U.S. population that tries to live their lives in isolation from the rest of society.

PERSONALLY, I COULDN’T help but notice the opposition of Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky. He’s the one-time professional baseball player (a Hall of Fame-quality pitcher) who has had a second career in the public eye as a part of the Capitol Hill set.

Bunning is determined to remain hung up on the “wise Latina” line, even though anyone who reads or hears what Sotomayor truly said when she used the line on a few occasions is that she thinks the Latina perspective is one that needs to be taken into account.

It definitely ought not to be ignored, which is how the Sotomayor critics come across whenever they complain about her. Should she think that Latinas are not wise?

It is as ridiculous as the commentary offered by conservative political pundit (and one-time Reagan Administration aide) Linda Chavez, who says the reason people should not support Sotomayor is because she acts as though Latinas are superior to other people.

THERE ARE TOO many people who seem to have a problem accepting that equality will have to cause them to change their own perceptions of society, instead of requiring Latinos to fit into their perception.

Seriously, that is how Bunning comes across. He issued a statement right after Sotomayor completed her three days of testimony (where she said as little about her ideological beliefs as most GOP-appointed Supreme Court have in recent years) where he tried bashing her again for implying that her ethnicity ought not be seen as a negative.

“She has said that the notion of impartiality on the bench is ‘an aspiration,’ and has gone on to claim that ‘by ignoring our differences as women and men of color we do a disservice both to law and society’,” Bunning said in his statement.

“When President Obama began discussing what sort of person he wanted to nominate to the Supreme Court, he put a premium on the nominee having ‘empathy’,” he said. “Well, it appears that he got his wish.”

NOW I KNOW political observers will take my observation that Bunning is living in the past and respond by saying, “What else is new?”

This is a man who in recent years has been giving the perception that he is out of touch with society. Some would argue that he may not even be in touch with the Capitol Hill scene.

His opponents in recent elections have tried to make an issue of his age (he’s 77) and mental stability. I’m not willing to go that far.

But I am willing to notice that even the people of his home state may be getting tired of his routine. A study issued earlier this week contended that he’s having trouble raising funds for his next re-election bid (although at just over $300,000, he did much better than the $845 raised in one quarter by soon-to-be-former Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill.).

BUNNING’S REPORTED FUNDRAISING is about half the amount raised by his most significant Republican challenger, and about one-quarter of what a possible Democratic Party challenger has produced.

Admittedly, Bunning has the advantage of incumbency, and running from a state that doesn’t exactly think of itself as a bastion of the Latino population (only 2.1 percent of the state’s population in 2000 identified itself as “Hispanic”).

But I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this comes up as a campaign issue – one that could cost him just as many, if not more, votes than it gains him. Stubbornly rejecting the idea of Sotomayor and trying to live in the past.

At least in the past, Bunning was a ballplayer who brought entertainment to a segment of the population (particularly in Detroit, where they love him as an athlete but despise him as a politico). As a politician these days, he has become sad, just like all the other people who are showing in their opposition to Sotomayor their refusal to accept the modern era.

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What is an activist court?

A federal judge this week ruled against the government structure in a suburb of Dallas, claiming it winds up restricting the potential for Latinos to get elected to local office and have a say in their community.

Already, this ruling in U.S. District Court against the government of Irving, Texas is causing some outrage in certain political circles. One website that tends to publish stories spun from a conservative standpoint (which is their right, this is a free country) has the account under a headline reading, “Federal judge orders racial gerrymandering.”

THAT IMPLIES THAT a judge has taken it upon himself to insist on a practice (creating political maps to benefit partisan interests, rather than those of the locals who live in Irving) that is generally spoken ill of amongst political observers.

Others are going to argue this somehow distorts Latino strength by giving it more influence than it ought to have – if only the people were allowed to choose for themselves who they want to represent them.

But it is because of cases like this that I have trouble taking seriously any activist who argues about “reverse discrimination” or any similar concept, because it usually turns out that what they’re interested in doing is preserving some old (and flawed) way of doing things.

In this particular case, one could argue it was the current setup that was holding back what should have been some Latino representation within Irving government, and that this is a case of the courts imposing the law in a proper way.

WHAT IS AT stake in Irving?

The case had been ongoing for months. That particular suburban community has an eight-member City Council. All eight aldermen are elected from across Irving, which means people get to choose eight politicians when they walk into the voting booth on Election Day.

What usually happens, both in Irving and in any other municipal government which has at-large elections, is that like-minded politicos run as an informal slate. So voters wind up picking eight like-minded people.

It tends to keep outsiders/troublemakers/riffraff/however you want to characterize them from being able to gain a foothold in the local government.

WHAT FEDERAL JUDGE Jorge Solis ruled is that Irving ought to draw up boundaries breaking itself up into specific wards, with voters in each ward getting one choice for their alderman. People living in other parts of town would get to pick their own political representative.

Solis cited past court rulings that forced Dallas itself to undertake such action.

The theory is that with Irving’s Latino population approaching 40 percent, it would be likely that a few of the wards would wind up having majority Latino population, and would result in the election of officials who were either Latino themselves, or would be answering to Latino voters who would dump them in the future if their actions became overly hostile to Latino interests.

Now from my own experience as a reporter-type covering political reapportionment battles, I know there are tricks that can be done to political maps and boundaries that could still hold down Latino representation.

TRUE LATINO POLITICAL empowerment will come when the population in the United States ages and the percentage of Latinos who vote comes close to the overall number of Latinos living in this country.

So I know that the creation of specific wards won’t eliminate the problem immediately. But it is that step in the right direction (if not the “far right’s” preferred direction).

Yet we’re going to hear rhetoric about how this is a step backward. It will also get bogged down in the ethnic tensions that dominate the whole issue of serious reform of the nation’s immigration laws (which are desperately needed, even though we can’t agree on what constitutes reform).

The Dallas Morning News even reports that Irving’s initial reaction is to talk about appealing the federal court ruling, in hopes that an appeals court or the Supreme Court of the United States itself will be willing to try to turn back time and overrule Judge Solis.

I’M NOT ABOUT to predict what would happen in an appeals court because anything can happen. There are many whims involved (even though some people like to think of the law as an absolute, and want to believe that it is absolutely against the changes in population that will take effect in this country during the 21st Century).

So it’s not like Irving is going to be picking any Latino aldermen any time soon.

But it does make me wonder about Irving, which until now was known primarily as the suburb where the stadium once used by the Dallas Cowboys football team was located.

You know, the stadium with the hole in the roof that the locals like to joke was there so that God can watch the Cowboys play on Sunday. By that logic, perhaps they ought to cut a hole in their municipal building so that the Lord can amuse himself by watching political people act like stubborn dunces trying to turn back the clock a hundred years or so.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The court battles likely will continue for some time with regards to the (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-irvvotingrights_16met.ART0.Central.Edition1.4bd8222.html) local government structure in a Dallas suburb.

This is how some people (http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/07/federal-judge-orders-racial-ge.html) prefer to view the world.

‘Splain to me why ‘splainin’ is funny out of context

I’m not sure whether to be ticked off at Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., or amused, by his questioning Wednesday of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

It was during a line of questioning about a person’s right to defend themselves with a firearm that he wanted to know what she would think if she were in a situation where she grabbed a pistol and shot someone who was trying to hurt her.

IN AN ATTEMPT to find some humor, Coburn morphed into Ricky Ricardo, that nightclub operator husband who loved Lucy so much that he put up with her antics.

As Coburn put it to Sotomayor, “you’ll have lots of ‘splainin’ to do.”

That was usually Desi Arnaz’ line right before he would engage in a rapid-fire diatribe in Spanish that it’s a good thing English-speaking America didn’t fully comprehend what he was saying. Or else that show might have been taken off the air and been long forgotten by now – instead of being remembered as a classic of early television.

I’m inclined to downplay the moment, because of the fact that Sotomayor on Wednesday during her confirmation hearings appeared to find some humor in his third-rate Ricky Ricardo impersonation.

HER RESPONSE TO Coburn? “I’d be in a lot of trouble then.”

It’s just that I always find it a little ridiculous for people to take that line and try to use it to berate someone for something they did. I have lost count of how many people have used it throughout the years. It has become old and moldy, and loses all humor when coming from anyone’s mouth other than Arnaz – who has been gone from this Earth for more than a third of a century.

That line should have died with him.

I wish I could think that a member of the U.S. Senate would be more eloquent than to use someone else’s 50-year-old stock line that has become a virtual cliché.

IN FACT, I wonder at times which line annoys me more – “You’ve got some ‘splainin to do,” or “Go ahead punk, Make my day.” A part of me would like to tell people who use either of these lines under any circumstance to “Eat my shorts.”

Which, come to think of it, probably deserves to be put on the list of annoying stock phrases as well. Sorry, Bart Simpson.

It’s just that a good part of the “humor” in that line was based in the fact that Cuban-born Arnaz, who played the part of Cuban-born Ricardo on the classic television comedy featuring his wife, didn’t exactly speak “the King’s English,” and certainly didn’t speak it in any way recognizable to anyone who did a Southern drawl.

So seeing a man tell his wife she had to explain herself, when he couldn’t exactly pronounce the word “explain” properly, was worth a giggle back in the days before being Cuban someone implied one had the potential to be a Communist.

LIKE I SAID, Sotomayor didn’t seem to take offense. And quite frankly, it is too stupid a moment to get too worked up over.

I’m sure Coburn himself would deny that any offense was intended.

But would Coburn have used such a line if he were trying to politically interrogate any other official? Or did the image of Ricky Ricardo talkin’ funny come to him because his target was a Nuyorican?

The Ricky Ricardo character also lived in New York (even though they moved to California for the final seasons of the show), although not in the Bronx like Sotomayor did growing up.

I’D HATE TO think that he believes all Latinos talk alike. I’m sure on a theoretical level, he realizes they don’t.

But if I had the chance to speak to Coburn (and I’m not in the District of Columbia as I write this, so I’m not in a position to saunter over and try to confront him), I suppose I’d have to ask him to explain himself why he thinks ‘splainin’ is all that funny.

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This “controversy” is so retro

It’s embarrassing that in the 21st Century, at a time when many of the social conservatives will argue that the battle for civil rights is over and that affirmative action is no longer necessary, we’re still seeing squabbles over white people getting upset at the thought of non-white kids using the same swimming pool.

So much for things having changed all that much.

I HAVE BEEN watching from afar the situation at the Valley Club, located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The club has a swimming pool, and had recently worked out a deal by which members of an inner-city youth group who paid a fee would be allowed to come out to the ‘burbs and use the pool.

That arrangement lasted all of one day.

The inner-city kids, most of whom were African-American but some of whom were Latino, had their one day in the pool about two weeks ago, then were told they weren’t welcome to return.

About the only positive in this is that the Valley Club refunded the money that had been paid for these kids to have a decent place to swim. It would have been really scummy had they tried to find a legal justification for keeping the cash.

THAT DAY TOOK place near the end of June, and during the past two weeks we across the nation have been bombarded with differing accounts of what happened.

The kids were rowdy. Gee, what a surprise. Kids in water on a hot day splashed about a bit.

No, many of them couldn’t swim, so it is a safety issue.

No, it was that their presence disrupted the typical atmosphere that the Valley Club’s regular patrons have come to expect.

WHO’S TO SAY exactly what it was that ticked people off so, except that I find it totally believable that that parents at the club that day who supposedly had their own kids get out of the water (isn’t that image supposed to be limited to newsreels from the 1950s?) when they saw the visitors were uncomfortable.

After all, the reality of many of these suburban communities (and not just in the Philadelphia metropolitan area) is that they have some residents who moved there explicitly to get away from inner-city life. I don’t doubt that on some level, there was a gut reaction that the very thing they were fleeing was in pursuit and gaining on them.

Now am I ready to brand every single club member as a bigot just because they had a problem sharing the pool with some Latino kids?

Not quite. But the idea that these club members are somehow being victimized by the negative attention they are getting in recent weeks somehow strikes me as being absurd.

THIS WAS SOMETHING brought on by their club’s leadership. If these members really felt that strongly about the issue, they’d be looking amongst themselves to try to figure out what is wrong.

Instead, they prefer to blame outside sources.

Now I understand that in the past couple of days, the club’s officials offered to reinstate the agreement they had with the inner-city groups that wanted to bring their children to the pool.

For their sake, I’m glad the inner-city kids have found an alternative and are refusing to accept the offer (which is being made more to cover their own shame, rather than out of any sense that they may have grossly over-reacted to the situation in the first place).

I EVEN SAW a comment in the Philadelphia-area newspapers on Tuesday where the club’s head says he would resign if that would appease locals into backing off the club.

I’m one Latino who says “big deal” if this one guy quits. It would still leave the rest of the leadership in place, and they’d probably be inclined to remember the club head as some sort of “hero” who “took one for the team” to let them survive in their ways.

The situation reminds me of an incident in Chicago and its suburbs several years ago where a Catholic parish on the South Side sponsored a neighborhood basketball team and intended to play against teams sponsored by other parishes – many of which were in the surrounding suburbs.

Imagine the sentiment of some of these suburban communities when they found out that a predominantly black youth team would be coming to their gymnasiums to take on their churches, which because of the local population breakdown consisted largely of white kids.

IT’S KIND OF like this stuff never goes away. There is a certain level of racial resistance that we still encounter in our society.

While I’m not naïve enough to think that prejudice will ever disappear (some people will always think it their “right” to look down on someone else), it is because of incidents like these that I find it ridiculous when some people try to claim that the “war” is over, and the bigots lost.

Because from where I sit, it seems they still have a little fight in them, and society as a whole ought to be doing what it can to ensure that such attitudes do not spread – not pretending that they somehow don’t matter.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The situation involving a suburban Philadelphia swimming pool’s (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/courier_times/courier_times_news_details/article/28/2009/july/14/day-camp-thanks-but-no-thanks.html) use has escalated beyond control.

What constitutes impartiality?

As I have always understood it, one of the functions of a Supreme Court is to keep government in check. They are the ones who have the authority to determine when an attempt by government to impose a new law is so egregious that it must be struck down.

Of course, people whose ideological views were supported by those unconstitutional measures will want to see the high court as somehow overstepping its boundaries. Perhaps it is natural for people to want to think their actions are always correct.

WHAT WINDS UP keeping a Supreme Court in check (in terms of those checks and balances on the branches of government) is that it has no authority to impose law. If a majority of the court thinks the law should say one thing, but the Legislature and chief executive decide otherwise – then the court cannot impose it on its own.

That is part of why I find it ridiculous that people are claiming that Sonia Sotomayor is somehow some sort of threat to the nation in that she will use her personal experiences as a Nuyorican (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican ethnic heritage) to impose her way of life on this country.

Aside from the fact that, if confirmed to the high court, she would only be one of nine justices, the fact is that the only way her views would truly get rammed down the throats of the people is if a majority of Congress and the president were to sign them into law first.

Then, she’d probably be one of the justices voting to uphold the law, when the social conservative groups would file their legal challenges.

IF THIS COUNTRY ever gets to the point where a Latino viewpoint becomes the majority, it is going to be a time so far in the future that to think of it now is absurd.

But if it means that the Latino viewpoint winds up being taken into consideration when the law is crafted, I’d say that is totally appropriate. After all, Latinos now are roughly one in six of the U.S. population – and growing.

The idea that these newcomers are to be ignored while the old regime is maintained is ridiculous. It is offensive. Heck, I’d say it ought to be illegal.

Yet, it also was the tone of some members of the Senate’s judiciary committee when they kicked off their confirmation proceedings on Monday in the District of Columbia.

THE DALLAS MORNING News gave attention to them, primarily because they want to promote the image that Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, (a committee member) is someone of significance.

That is why we got to learn of Cornyn’s opening statement, which he directed as a shot to Sotomayor.

“Judge, some of your opinions suggest that you would limit some of these constitutional rights, and some of your public statements suggest that you would invest rights that do not exist in the Constitution.”

Of course, some of us would argue that what she did in the past was to extend legal rights to some people who in the past have had their rights ignored. In that context, the issue becomes one of the court protecting the rights of all people – even though some prefer to claim that constitutes an “activist court.”

IT JUST AMAZES me that some people seriously believe that a truly legitimate court – the strict constructionist model that many conservatives boast of supporting – is about promoting the interests of a status quo that in many instances is in desperate need of significant change.

For her part, Sotomayor made only a brief statement – one in which she says she is “loyal’ to the idea of “the impartiality of our justice system.” Of course, such a statement is vague and could be interpreted by people with serious conspiracy-theory mentalities as meaning just about anything.

So am I terribly offended by the actions of those members of the judiciary committee’s minority who deep down are upset they don’t have the votes to strike down her nomination?

Not really. I understand the concept of partisan politics. In many ways, their opposition was no different than the trash talk we heard during the past presidential administration for Supreme Court nominees with different ideological bearings.

IF ANYTHING, THE significance of all this is to see how Sotomayor responds to such criticism.

Which means the next couple of days could be crucial, even though even her GOP opposition will go so far as to predict she “won’t melt down.”

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EDITOR’S NOTES: They’re posturing to their political supporters to make it appear as (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/071409dnnatcornyn.3874885d.html) though they did something with regard to Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Anti-abortion activists tried to shift attention from the nomination of the first Latina to the Supreme Court (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/13/AR2009071302345.html?hpid=topnews) to that of whether the high court goofed back with Roe v. Wade.

Sotomayor hearings take on “big game” atmosphere

For those people who get into the concept of political empowerment for Latinos, Monday almost feels like the arrival of the Super Bowl.

I say that in noting that the two major Spanish-language television networks in the United States have plans to give significant amounts of airtime toward live coverage of the confirmation hearings that will go a long way toward deciding how quickly Sonia Sotomayor will become a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

UNIVISION AND TELEMUNDO plan to air portions of those hearings live, and also will be devoting significant amounts of their national newscasts to analysis of the proceedings.

Much of that analysis will be devoted to the question of how intensely do the Republican members of the Senate judiciary committee try to oppose her.

Because that will be seen as providing anecdotal evidence of how much the GOP is determined to keep Latinos out of their political party. Lightening up on Sotomayor could be evidence that the GOP may have people who are willing to be inclusive of the fast-growing segment of the U.S. population.

Now keep in mind that the television networks would not be devoting such attention to the Senate proceedings unless they perceived there was interest. After all, there are some abuelitas (and a few dirty old men) who probably will get a little upset that their telenovelas are being preempted for a political battle, played by Robert’s Rules of Order.

BUT THOSE NETWORKS, along with many English-speaking news outlets, are detecting that there is interest in the Sotomayor proceedings. Even for those people who don’t want to have to think of Latino political empowerment, there is the sense that Republicans are being tested to see if they can do anything to oppose the desires of President Barack Obama.

Their attempts earlier to oppose the economic stimulus package was unsuccessful, both in the sense that it passed despite overwhelming GOP opposition and because of the perception among the people that the plan is doing some good.

A stumbling GOP in the next couple of weeks would just reinforce the image of a political version of the Keystone Kops.

Another reason I make the Super Bowl comparison is because, like the National Football League’s championship game, the event has the potential to turn into an anti-climactic proceeding.

THE SUPER BOWL all too often turns into an event with much hype about how “history is being made” and how the matchup will provide great sports action that people must see for themselves. The actual game fails to live up to its billing.

Either the favored winner wins so easily, or two teams bumble their way on the field in between the overly priced television commercials that the game itself is a letdown.

And these confirmation hearings definitely have the potential for letdown status.

After all, this is a Democrat-controlled judiciary committee. If the Democratic members of the committee all stick with the president, it won’t matter what the Republican members say or do.

ANY TYPE OF “dirt” they dig up on Sotomayor (and they likely will try to turn part of the proceedings into an inquisition of sorts) will be ignored, and she will be confirmed.

What we’re really going to be watching for is Sotomayor’s demeanor itself.

How does she conduct herself while being grilled by Republican officials who are trying to play to their political base to keep support for the next Election Day, while not appearing to be biased against Latinos (which has the potential to strengthen the Democratic Party’s support among us)?

Does she some off as someone who is distinguished and has a sense of the law and of fairness? Or will she some across as the high court nitwit who will provide standup comedians with material for a decade or two to come?

THERE’S EVEN ONE other aspect of the upcoming proceedings that give the political event something of a sports theme – the telephone call from the president.

It is not unheard of for the sitting president to make a telephone call to the stadium where the Super Bowl is held, and offer a quick congratulations to the head coach of the winning team.

The only difference here is that the call has already occurred.

White House officials on Sunday released a statement confirming that Obama made a telephone call to Sotomayor to “wish her luck” as she gets herself ready for the confirmation hearing.

IT TURNS OUT that Sotomayor has done some preparatory work in recent weeks, making her own courtesy calls to 89 of the 100 senators, and part of her discussion with them was to show how she follows the rule of law when making her legal rulings – which is meant to counter some of the early GOP trash talk that claimed she would be biased in favor of Latinos (which the nativists interpret to mean as being biased against them).

“The president expressed his confidence that Judge Sotomayor would be confirmed to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court for many years to come,” presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said, in a prepared statement.

In fact, about the only thing missing from the hearings to begin this week are the concept of a half-time show with lots of dancing and singing and other nonsense. Then again, we will have the U.S. senators themselves, at least a few of whom are likely to say something stupid enough to be entertaining. Or maybe the newest member, Al Franken, will say something entertaining enough to be stupid?

My only hope is that none of them chooses the judiciary committee as the place to have a wardrobe malfunction. I personally have no desire to see Arlen Specter or Nancy Pelosi in that way.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Many Latinos will take the Senate confirmation hearings more seriously (http://www.norwichbulletin.com/news/x135748995/Sotomayor-hearings-raise-fear-of-racism-among-Hispanics-in-Eastern-Connecticut) than the Super Bowl.

Lucha Libre a natural for videogames

I can’t help but react to the word that a new videogame based on the “mundial” of Mexican freestyle wrestling by asking, “What took you so long?”

I wonder that because the whole concept of videogames is to come up with something that will provide an extremely graphic, if not downright bizarre, image for one to look at.

OTHERWISE, VIDEOGAMES ARE just stupid devices where one twiddles their thumbs and pushes buttons. Where’s the fun in that? It’s about the show on the screen, and the thought that one can somehow control it.

And when it comes to graphic and bizarre images, what works better than those masked and caped wrestlers of Mexican wrestling?

Particularly if one can have them engage in potentially dangerous (if not crippling) action moves. It’s all about the show, and the video game can give us images that we would never accept in real life (because they would be too graphic and crippling).

That is what professional wrestling is about, in general. That is what the Mexican take on freestyle wrestling (known more conventionally by its translation en Español as Lucha Libre) is, in specific.

THINK ABOUT IT.

I’m not going to claim to be the biggest follower of the Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, although there are times when I’m flipping around the television I can be convinced to stop at one of the Spanish-language television stations for a few minutes if they’re giving us the latest matches from Mexico.

When it comes to real sport from Latin America, I follow the professional leagues for soccer and the national teams (and am thoroughly amazed and disgusted with the performance of late of the Mexican national futbol team). I also am one of those who will check out the standings in the winter months to see how the professional baseball leagues in Mexico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic are going.

But when it comes to spectacle, I’ll watch the wild moves with the crazed costumes of Lucha Libre. I can see where some people would be willing to witness such a spectacle for hours on end.

COMPARED TO THE trashy spectacle of World Wrestling Entertainment (which just comes off as so rehearsed and fake, even though I realize the “wrestlers” are putting on a show that can cause completely real physical pain), the Mexican-style of wrestling comes off as entertaining in a bizarre otherworldly way.

And the kind of people who can appreciate such things would be naturals to go out and buy videogames based on such spectacle.

Now, such spectacle will be reality.

Companies based in Mexico and Colombia will be creating versions of Lucha Libre intended for consumption across the Americas. People who have Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 consoles could be able to get the game by about the Christmas holiday shopping season.

PEOPLE WHO PREFER Wii, Nintendo or PSP (the little handheld Playstation gizmos) will have to wait until next year before all those crazed characters with their signature masks and wrestling moves will be available.

And yes, the audio commentary meant to accompany the games will be offered both in English y Español. So it’s not like only Spanish-speakers will be able to appreciate the unique little details offered by the games.

Personally, I never was able to get into the videogame scene (of course, I’m old enough to remember playing “Pong” when it first came out). Perhaps those dead graphics just made the whole concept seem pointless to me.

But I have a brother, along with nephews, who are into the scene, and who can’t agree among themselves about which game system is the best.

SO AM I about to wind up buying multiple versions of Lucha Libre to fulfill my holiday shopping obligations?

The very thought may repulse those of us who are more responsible about life, but somehow, I have the feeling my 14- and 9-year-old nephews wouldn’t be the least bit grossed out at the sight of Lucha Libre on their screens.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Check out the details for yourself about Lucha Libre turned to (http://www.slang.vg/preesroom.html#first_videogame) videogame.

Does Chavez legacy gain from multiple streets?

Down in Dallas, officials are fighting about which local street will have to take the “honor” of being named for United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, while officials in Portland managed to pick a street over the objections of the local residents.

In all, Chavez has about 25 municipalities across the United States that have chosen to pay tribute to his memory by naming a street in his honor, similar to the hundreds of towns that have Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards, or streets, or whatever.

BUT THERE ARE times I wonder if by reducing the name Chavez to that of a road, if we are actually lessening the public’s awareness of the man behind the name.

Could we be creating a future generation of people who will see those “Chavez Street” signs up on the post, think it just another part of the landscape, and care less to find out who he actually was?

Think about it.

How many streets in your respective home community bear a name of someone that you honestly don’t have a clue who that person was? Does it really do much good to stick up a street sign and do nothing more to pay tribute to a person?

I HAVE ALWAYS been of the belief that municipal governments ought to be trying to reduce the number of names they have on their streets (and not just because numbered streets are more simple to follow).

Too many places get tied up in political concerns about who they choose to honor, then they run out of streets when someone who truly is worth honoring comes along. We could get to the point where someone doesn’t get the street named after him, but gets the street post instead.

Think of it. Chavez Pole on 39th Street. It sounds totally ridiculous.

But it’s not any more ridiculous than the infighting that takes place whenever municipalities try to pay tribute to their growing Latino populations, but can’t think of anyone other than Cesar Chavez for whom to name a street.

IT WINDS UP creating a lot of resentment from locals who wind up taking it as a moral crusade of sorts to fight against naming anything for Chavez.

That is what appears to have happened in Dallas, where last year officials wanted to come up with a new name for Industrial Boulevard. They didn’t anticipate a local poll that would show great support for the name “Chavez Boulevard.”

They didn’t go along with it, and now all the people who hated that idea are fighting any attempt to find an alternative.

Perhaps it is fitting that Chavez was controversial in life as a union organizer, so perhaps he should remain as an outspoken presence even now, 16 years after his death.

BUT THE CONTINUING infighting in Dallas is merely making that city look ridiculous, as are the opponents in Portland, which this week renamed 39th Avenue for Chavez.

The locals who live along the street are arguing the usual arguments about how expensive it will be to change their street addresses on all their legal correspondence. There is a slight truth to that.

But it literally has people engaging in a battle to keep as pedestrian a name as 39th Avenue. And I wonder how much it keeps us from truly understanding what Chavez was about?

My other concern is to wonder if Portland now thinks it has done all that is necessary to recognize the fact that the Latino portion is on the rise in that northwestern U.S. city.

READING THE NEWS coverage of the street name change, I get that impression. Reports cite the fact that Chavez joins King, Rosa Parks and Bill Naito (a local business executive of Japanese ethnic descent) in having Portland streets named for them.

Will some people be inclined to think Latinos now got their share, and don’t need to be thought of much more? I’d hope that does not turn out to be the case.

If some people seriously think the Chavez name can be slapped onto a lamppost, then ignored, I’d argue they don’t really understand what the man was about. For Chavez in life was someone who refused to be ignored – even though he represented migrant farm workers whom society at the time preferred not to think about at all.

My bottom line?

STREET SIGNS ARE a cheap tribute, and people interested in paying serious respect to someone’s memory ought to be doing much more than paying for the making of a few rectangular signs.

Otherwise, we might see the day when people will read all those “Chavez Boulevard” signs in Portland and other cities, and figure someone felt a need to pay respect to Julio Cesar Chavez – the great Mexican boxer.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Local residents will continue to gripe about the Cesar Chavez (http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/07/no_way_to_honor_cesar_chavez.html) name change, even after it has become official.

This is NOT the honoree (http://www.juliocesarchavez.net/) of all those “Chavez Boulevard” signs that will crop up around the country.

NOTICIAS de LATINO: “Can’t tell the players without a scorecard”

Courtesy of the New York Times, we get an accounting of the government officials who are (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/19/us/politics/0619-scotus.html) going to have to put their reputations on the line beginning next week with regards to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The newspaper gave us an accounting of the membership of the Senate judiciary committee – the government body that will get to grill the appeals court justice from New York and recommend whether or not she ought to get the full Senate’s confirmation.

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT political people as long-serving as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and as rookie-ish as Al Franken of Minnesota. The latter literally gets his introduction to being a senator by getting a say as to whether or not Sotomayor should be a Supreme Court justice.

And yes, the 19-member committee has 12 Democrats, many of whom are inclined to support her just to spite the people whose nativist rhetoric is at the base of Sotomayor opposition.

That is bound to cause some accusations that the process is somehow rigged. I guess it is, if you consider having a legislative body that follows the will of the people as a whole, rather than the will of one region of the country, to be rigged.

Those confirmation hearings begin Monday on Capitol Hill. Just in case you have enough of a real life that you weren’t hanging on every word of the process that could put the Puerto Rican from the Bronx on the high court, and make her the first Latina.

AND YES, I realize that saying she’s the first Latina technically is diminishing because that merely means she’s the first woman with Latin American ethnic origins. She’s really more than that, which is the reason so many Latino activist groups are taking up her cause and are eager to see her get confirmed.

But I’m inclined to go along with “Latina” because that’s how she refers to herself. Imposing some other label almost makes it seem like I’m not allowing her to define her own self-image.

That would be absurd.

What other items in the news are noteworthy these days?

LADIES ON THE PITCH: There are times when the sexism of Latin American culture cracks me up. It goes down to the very language of Spanish. When there are mixed-gender elements in a group, the male of the species prevails.

It is what creates ridiculous notions such as whether Sotomayor is Latina, or ought to be more broadly thought of as Latino. And it apparently extends to athletics too.

In an age when many people in this country see soccer as some sort of foreigner’s game, and others see it as a sport where the girls can play just as well as the boys, it is interesting to note that many Latinos have problems with their daughters playing the game that is the big time back home.

The Kansas City Star newspaper published a story this week about local high schools with girl’s soccer teams (http://www.kansascity.com/sports/story/1312203.html) and the struggles they go through to get their families to accept the very thought. It sounds too much like the nonsense that Anglo families went through a few decades ago.

UNEMPLOYMENT CONTINUES TO RISE: The National Council of La Raza notes that unemployment for Latinos continues to rise – up about 13 percent these days.

The group says that means Latino unemployment is about as severe as the rate for African-American people (15 percent), and means that this economic downtown is hammering away at non-Anglo people harder than the average of society as a whole.

“Though the outlook may seem bleak, minority communities are invested in the promising deceleration of unemployment,” Janet Murguìa of La Raza told the San Antonio Business Journal.

So perhaps at a time when one of us is on the verge of gaining lifetime employment (that’s what a Supreme Court post amounts to), we ought to remember those of us Latinos (http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/07/06/daily31.html) in search of work.

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Arellano won’t get public voice on immigration issue

It is official – Elvira Arellano is not going to be a member of Mexico’s Congress.

The woman who spent a year holed up in a church in Chicago’s largely Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood to avoid being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and deported lost in Sunday’s mid-term elections for political positions across Mexico.

ARELLANO, WHOSE SON remains in the United States (he was born here, so he gets citizenship), had submitted herself as a candidate for Congress from the Baja California, which is the state along the border surrounding Tijuana.

Arellano had hopes of becoming a political official who could put a personal face on the immigration from Mexico’s perspective – in short, why are so many people willing to risk a walk through the deadly desert to live in a United States with hostile elements that cause them to have to live their lives in secret?

It’s not that Mexicans rejected the idea of having to consider if their political system is so flawed that many Mexicans would rather live somewhere else. It more is the fact of politics as usual.

Family rules.

IN SHORT, SHE was running for Congress against the brother of the governor of the Baja.

He needed a political post to hold, and his brother provided a campaign organization that could turn out the vote.

So she probably never had much of a chance of winning. Of course, it didn’t help her much that her political party is the one that has a reputation in Mexico of being “leftist.” Of course, the people who think that are the same types as those in this country who go about tossing words like “socialist” to describe the current president and “Communist” whenever the Democratic Party is discussed.

But it could have been interesting had Arellano gained a post that would have given her fight on the immigration issue a bit of political legitimacy.

FOR THE FACT is that Arellano was the woman who risked much to get into the United States, and once she was here wasn’t exactly getting rich off the American teat, no matter how much the nativists want to claim that “foreigners” are bleeding the U.S. dry.

She was working a job at an airport, so she was the woman who got on the airplane after it landed and the passengers dispersed, and had to pick up after the mess made by those very passengers.

This “illegal” operated a vacuum cleaner. Or at least she did until federal authorities did a raid and busted up her employment.

It was at that point that she took to the church and remained inside for a whole year – based on the notion that federal immigration authorities wouldn’t have the nerve to enter a church and take her out kicking and screaming.

THEY DID NOT.

They waited her out until she finally decided to leave and be an activist on the immigration issue, knowing she’d be picked up eventually and deported – which she was, in Los Angeles.

Since arriving in Tijuana (which puts her within sight and earshot of the United States), she has traveled to Cuba, Spain and Italy to talk about the immigration issue.

It is what she does.

SHE WANTS TO make people aware of the fact that it isn’t a criminal hoard sliming its way across the line in the dirt that is the U.S./Mexico border, but merely people wishing to make a better life for themselves while also potentially boosting the economy of their recipient nation.

After all, Arellano was essentially a cleaning woman – even though some will claim she was a potential threat to this nation because of her proximity to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

The image of the woman with the vacuum being the threat to national security is just a tad too ridiculous to take seriously.

But perhaps the thought of her political bid was also too much for some people to take seriously.

SOME MEXICAN OFFICIALS prefer to think that it is merely a bit of disloyalty to country that causes so many of my ethnic brethren to think that the United States offers a chance of a better life.

That allows them to ignore the very real problems that hold a large percentage of the population down and give them next to no chance to advance in life. That certainly was the situation some 80 years ago when my own grandfathers made the decision while still teenagers that they had more opportunities if they moved from their homes in central Mexican states.

So while it isn’t a surprise that Arellano didn’t win, I must admit to thinking it is a shame. Her presence in Mexico City could have stirred up enough of a political “hornet’s nest,” so to speak, to make the issue interesting.

The chances are good that she would have said some things about her Mexican counterparts that would have even gained some support from her one-time critics in the United States.

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Only six more days until confirmation begins

I’m eagerly looking forward to the beginning of confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor to be on the Supreme Court of the United States – primarily because I’m getting sick and tired of the lame attempts by conservative partisans trying to find any excuse their minds can concoct to try to bash her.

Those hearings in the U.S. Senate begin Monday. That is when the Republican opposition is going to have to put up, or shut up, so to speak. We’ll find out for sure what kind of goods they have on the appeals court justice from New York.

ALL I CAN say is if the trash talk we’ve heard so far is the best they’ve got, then I can’t help but think the lady from the Bronx is a shoo-in to be confirmed to the high court seat.

Even Colin Powell seems to think so.

Because it was a Sunday and because about the only other “news” was pictures of fireworks exploding, Powell’s appearance on CNN warranted more attention that it deserved.

Because about all he was really saying is that it is ridiculous to think the fact that Sotomayor used to do legal work for activist groups promoting the interests of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos somehow makes her racist.

ASIDE FROM THE argument that it is impossible for someone in a minority group to be racist (prejudiced would be the correct word, but it has a lesser meaning), there’s just the fact that the people who seem to get most bent out of shape about Sotomayor are the ones who somehow think that her work on behalf of Latinos goes counter to what this country is about – rather than realizing it upholds the very ideal of a group trying to work its way into the mainstream of the society.

If anything, these people seem to want a Supreme Court that is biased – one that works to hold back the interests of anyone who can’t naturally fit into an Anglo majority (which was the image of what this nation was a century ago).

Powell, who still prefers to go by the Republican Party label when identifying himself, says it ought not to be a disqualifier that she is “Democrat” or “liberal.”

But that is what the Sotomayor opponents want to believe. My guess is they’d love to have nine justices like Antonin Scalia (or perhaps eight Scalias with one Clarence Thomas for show).

SO WE’RE GOING to hear a lot of whispers from people who hope that something from their trash talk somehow sticks – then they can start screaming it to the public come the confirmation hearings next week.

How do I define trash talk?

I’d cite a report published last week by the Washington Times newspaper as being a perfect example – except that it’s not talk, it’s the printed word.

Regardless, the newspaper with a conservative ideological bent goes out of its way to tell us about the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (for which Sotomayor used to be an attorney).

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION is all it truly is. They want us to believe that everything the group did is somehow reflective of what Sotomayor stood for.

Except that when one reads the “list” of “bad” things that PRLDEF did, only the most hard-core of political partisans could consider any of them “bad.”

The group was opposed to the 1980s Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork because they thought his conservative agenda would harm the interests of the growing Latino population.

Of course, a lot of other groups also had their problems with Bork’s nomination by then-President Ronald Reagan. That’s why the Senate ultimately rejected the idea of Bork some 22 years ago.

BRINGING UP BORK comes across like someone with a 22-year-old grudge who just can’t let it go. It is as ridiculous as every single time a conservative reminds us of the grief Thomas was put through during his confirmation hearings (forgetting the fact that Thomas got confirmed – and has now been on the high court for some 18 years).

The newspaper also reminds us about how the Puerto Rican group is supportive of a woman’s right to legally abort a pregnancy and also has problems with the death penalty and the way it negatively impacts non-white criminal defendants.

The far right (which was deluded by the outcome of the 2000 presidential election into thinking it was the mainstream of thought in this nation) will hate to hear this, but there are a lot of people in this country who would be in complete agreement with the Puerto Rican group.

Believe it or not, most of those people are not Puerto Rican, or Latino at all. She’s probably closer to the mainstream of society than any of her critics are.

IF ANYTHING, THE appointment of Sotomayor to the high court could wind up bringing a balance to the thought process that ultimately decides when the politicians have gone too far in trying to pass laws that are bad (which is the court’s purpose).

It could mean that the appointment of people like Sotomayor goes counter to that vision of presidents such as Reagan and Bush to stack the federal courts with social conservatives who will take actions that will push their views for generations to come.

And if so, then that is a good thing for our nation.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Fellow Bronx native Colin Powell spoke out in defense recently of (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/07/06/2009-07-06_sonia_not_a_racist_says_colin.html) Sonia Sotomayor.

The people who are most vehemently opposed to the thought of Sotomayor on the high court (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/02/nominee-advised-critics-of-bork/?feat=home_headlines) are further out of touch with the mainstream of our society than they want to believe Sotomayor is.

Census a count of people, not citizens

One of the arguments I have heard used about how flawed the U.S. Census is these days is that it is wrong for people who are not U.S. citizens to be counted.

Including them in the population count for the United States somehow distorts “the truth” about the current composition of this country – or so argue the nativist elements of our society.

THESE ARE THE people who argue that it is somehow un-American for the Latino activist groups to try to organize efforts to ensure that we get as accurate a count of how many Latinos there are in this country these days.

After all, they will argue, many of the Latinos are not yet U.S. citizens, and should not be counted. Attempts to count them are merely a scam by local government officials who are desperate to goose up their individual population counts to try to increase the share of federal and state funding they will receive during the upcoming decade.

Having written those four paragraphs, I feel like I have committed the act of diarrhea of the fingers, spewing a whole load of “caca” onto the Internet.

Seriously, I don’t understand the logic of people who get so bent out of shape about this issue.

THE WHOLE PURPOSE of the Census Bureau study that will be conducted next year will be to come up with as accurate an answer to a single question – How many people lived in the United States on April 1, 2010?

It isn’t how many U.S. citizens are there. If it were, then we’d have to figure out a way of counting all those expatriots who now are living or working in other countries – but for whatever reason choose to keep their legal status as citizens of the United States.

Not that I’m blaming those people for their choice.

But it is supposed to be about counting up how many people are here in this country. And whether or not one is a proper citizen, if they’re here they ought to be included in the overall tally.

IF ANYTHING, I’D like to get a count on how many people living here are not U.S. citizens, and how many of those do not have the visa or other documentation that would allow them to live openly in this country.

Not that I’m interested in compiling a list of cases for deportation. But I’d enjoy having an accurate figure of how many people were so desperate for a better life that they endured the hassles of slipping into this country (either by literally sneaking past a Border Patrol post or by overstaying a tourist or student visa).

One of the drawbacks of writing commentary about immigration issues is that one of the key statistics (12 million) concerning the number of people who are not in this country properly is little more than a guess.

It could be so ridiculously wrong that it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. If anything, an accurate figure would show us just how serious the immigration reform issue truly is.

SOMETIMES, I GET the sense that some people in this country don’t want to bother with the issue because they think it somehow doesn’t affect them directly.

That is why I will always have a hard time comprehending the thought process of those activists who are encouraging people to ignore the Census Bureau study when they receive it next spring.

They claim it is an act of protest to gain the attention of the federal government. I’d argue the way to gain the attention of the federal government and political people is to come up with the most accurate accounting possible of just how many Latinos there are in the United States – and how many of us seriously have visa issues.

If anything, it would show the people who don’t want to take the issue seriously that they risk their own political future because we are a growing number. And by all figures, it appears that growing numbers of us are U.S.-born.

THE REASON WE take the interest in this issue is because we realize there are those of you who cannot (or do not) want to tell the difference between a U.S. citizen Latino, a Latin American with a visa and one without.

So when I receive that Census Bureau form, I will be among those who quickly fills it out (although I doubt I’ll be as enthusiastic as Steve Martin’s “Navin Johnson” character was when the new telephone books arrived).

And any Latino with much in the way of sense ought to be doing the same. If we want to be fully included in the society of this nation, the first step is that we have to be counted.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Down along the U.S./Mexico border, local officials are trying to figure (http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/census-99625-city-residents.html) out how to get the most accurate population figure possible.

It wasn’t just an Anglo war

It should not come as any surprise that people we would now think of as Latinos were involved in the fight for U.S. independence.

Some of the places we now think of as U.S. states were originally Spanish colonies, which means there were people with ties and loyalties to Spain on this continent when the disputes between England and its colonies on the Atlantic coast devolved into a shooting war in 1775.

MANY OF THOSE people were willing to give their support in the form of rations and weapons (and occasional manpower) to their English-colonist neighbors on the continent.

And when in 1779 it became apparent that these English colonists might very well be able to hold out against the British army (they defeated the British at Saratoga, N.Y.), Spain itself declared war against England on June 21 – maintaining that status until the day that England recognized independence for the fledgling United States.

Those of us who are working the barbecue grills on Saturday to cook up some carne asada (rather than some weenies or overly-fatty ground beef) have just as much a right to think of this as our holiday as anyone else in this country.

I feel compelled to say this because I think back to my own U.S. history courses in school that told us about the great French support for the colonists’ effort, and also mentioned various names of Prussians and Poles who helped out. Lafayette, Pulaski and Von Stuben are just a few of the names I can recall from grammar school history.

BUT WHAT ABOUT Bernardo de Gàlvez, the colonial governor in New Orleans who helped sabotage British Navy efforts to gain control of the Mississippi River, then later organized a militia of Spanish loyalists, native Indian tribes and freed slaves that overcame British forces in places ranging from Baton Rouge, La., Mobile, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla.

He wasn’t alone. There were many people on this continent whose ethnic background was Spanish who recalled the recent loss in the Seven Years War of the 1750s and the loss of the colony of “Florida.” Aside from manpower, there were supplies and firearms provided by them toward the English colonists’ attempt at revolution.

It may have been a case of “the Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend” that encouraged them to take a dig or two at the British, but support was still support. Without that foreign support, there wouldn’t be a United States these days.

And for those of you who like to make half-witted cracks about the French and surrendering, keep in mind that if it were true, we’d likely be treating this like a typical Saturday (instead of a day in which you got to leave work early yesterday) and there’d probably be a British history book devoting a paragraph or two to such “terrorists” as Jefferson, Franklin and Washington.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For those of you who are interested in reading a recitation of Spanish-tinged names that helped support the revolutionary movement that spurred (http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=refugio_rochin) creation of the United States, one can check out this study – particularly pages 12 and 13.

La policia – the solution, or the problem?

It ought to be one of the many things about life in the United States that is so much better than life in the “old country” somewhere in Latin America – the police in this country are somewhat professional in their work and are not necessarily in the pocket of the politicians or the drug lords.

In short, they’re not the establishment goons.

YET THE PROBLEM these days seems to be that some people in this country with their hang-ups about the growing Latino population want the police to reinforce such beliefs. And in some cases, there are cops who are more than willing to go along.

There are, however, also cases where the local police are reaching out to try to erase the negative perceptions. In short, there are some cops who understand that if they want to gain the trust of the Latino community, they have to do something to show they ought to be trusted.

In fact, the future of Latino/police relations in the next couple of decades is that police departments have the potential to be a virtual checkerboard across the nation – with some departments being understanding of our presence and others downright hostile.

That literally was the impression I got from a pair of news stories I stumbled across on Thursday about Latino/police relations out west – Oklahoma and Utah, to be specific.

TAKE THE POLICE in Tulsa, where they are showing signs they want to hear from Latinos.

Television station KJRH noted that the police department’s web site is now including links for people whose language preference is Español. Those links give people information that might seem as basic as the proper way to report a crime, or the proper telephone numbers to use in varying types of emergencies.

The police even include instructions on how to go about filing a report against a police officer, if one is convinced that a cop did them wrong in dealing with them.

I’m not naïve enough to think that Tulsa, Okla., has become some sort of bastion of friendliness for its Latino population when it comes to dealings with the police.

BUT THIS IS a significant step in letting people know that the police are there to protect, rather than “preserve disorder” (which was once the slip of the tongue of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley).

It is a first step, and if more departments across the nation were willing to behave in such ways, I’d be more optimistic about the future over the course of, say, the next 50 or so years.

I realize this is a situation that will change gradually with time, as law enforcement will have to alter its general approach or else lose its relevance to society as a whole.

But the idea of gradual change doesn’t do much for those people who are living in the here and now. And the fact is that there are some people who are misguided enough that they would prefer to have their police act as “goon squads” of sorts against the growing Latino populace.

TAKE UTAH, WHICH on Wednesday had a new law take effect.

The new law allows for local police officers to seek designation as federal agents for purposes of enforcing the nation’s flawed immigration laws (the ones that President Barack Obama is eventually going to have to get around to trying to fix).

To their credit, no law enforcement agency in Utah was all that eager to take on such a role. At least that is what the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper reported Thursday.

People who push for such laws like to envision the thought of local cops pulling people over for a traffic violation, discovering they do not have a valid visa (because they look “so foreign”), then personally driving them down to the U.S./Mexico border to get them out of this country.

THAT HYPERBOLE MIGHT be a bit much. But the simplistic thought is what some people wish the local police could be.

That new law had Latino activists on Thursday trying to organize to inform people how to go about filing a legitimate complaint if they are hassled by police officers who think they can suddenly enforce their take on immigration laws.

The Salt Lake Tribune says that activists are literally informing people of one of their basic rights when dealing with police – the right to remain silent, at least when it comes to questions about immigration status.

The other “advice” being given out to the Latinos who choose to live in Utah is to ensure that their driver’s licenses and automobile registration are valid and current. Best to give a potentially hostile police officer fewer legitimate excuses to be questioning them.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Will police in Utah get more bold when it comes to questioning people (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_12742154) about their immigration status if they come across people who they think look “too foreign?”

Taking a more welcoming tone toward the Latino population ought not to mean that the laws (http://www.kjrh.com/news/local/story/Tulsa-Police-seek-new-Hispanic-relationship/mS8K37BURk-VaHdnxpAo-w.cspx) are not being enforced.

Arizona does wrong thing, then rights itself

Political process can create failure, then success on an issue within a matter of hours. That was the case in the Arizona Legislature earlier this week when it comes to immigration.

At stake was a proposal by state Sen. Russell Pearce who wanted to rewrite the laws against trespassing to make it possible for police to apply them to people they had reason to suspect did not have the proper visa or other papers to openly live in the United States.

IN SHORT, THE undocumented worker (which I’m sure some crackpot nativist will e-mail me to say is really the “illegal alien” who ought to be sent back to Planet Mehico).

The local cops could literally start rounding them up by claiming their very presence in Arizona was a crime. And no, I don’t have much faith in the local police in Arizona (even though I realize the long-outspoken sheriff of Maricopa County is a cartoonish exaggeration of what a law enforcement official ought to be) to tell what constitutes a legitimate visa, particularly if they come at it from the mental approach that certain people ought not to be there – regardless of what papers they might happen to be carrying.

Supporters of Pearce’s measure claimed they were literally adding a second layer of enforcement of federal immigration laws to catch people who managed to slip past the Border Patrol outposts on the state’s southern end (which doubles as a portion of the U.S./Mexico border).

No other state is so ridiculous as to think that trespassing laws (which themselves are often vaguely written so as to allow them to be applied to many different circumstances) are in any way related to immigration.

YET THAT DIDN’T stop the Arizona state Senate from going along with Pearce’s bill on Wednesday. It’s a good thing that the state House of Representatives later that same day voted on the issue, and failed to give it enough votes to pass into law.

So for the time being, the issue is dead. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Pearce himself believes in this issue vehemently enough that he will try to resurrect it in the future.

In one sense, I’m a little dismayed. The measure actually got more votes of support (26) than opposition (15) in the Arizona House. But it didn’t get enough votes as required by the Legislature’s rules of operating (31) to be approved.

So I will take a technical victory, even though I would have preferred an overwhelming vote of opposition to this ridiculous concept.

I LABEL IT ridiculous because I think it downright absurd that anyone would think to use trespassing laws to try to deal with an issue as serious as immigration.

If anything, this whole effort in Arizona is probably the evidence we need to see that the local officials don’t have a realistic concept of the scope of immigration law and the issues it brings up.

This is the issue that Congress will have to address, so as to provide a consistent standard across the United States. This most definitely is NOT an issue that we want to have a checkerboard approach of differing laws in all 50 states.

What is most discouraging in one sense is that this happened in a southwestern U.S. state.

I’M NOT TRYING to lambaste Idaho or Montana or Vermont, but I could understand why taking some sort of action like this might cross the minds of those local officials. Although those states also are on an international border, the fact is that U.S./Canada relations will never be as controversial as those with Mexico, and they don’t have the daily contact that the southwestern United States does.

For many people, the whole issue of immigration relates to Latin American nations – even though it really impacts the ability of everybody in the world and their relations with the United States.

I would have hoped that a southwestern state like Arizona (or Texas, California, Nevada or New Mexico) would have had enough daily exposure to the presence of Mexico just over the line in the dirt that the border is along much of its 1,900-plus miles to approach this issue a little more rationally.

Instead, we’re getting hysterical rhetoric about immigration and trespassing from a place that should know better. After all, this was a state that had nearly one-third of its overall 6.5 million population identify as Latino (with 15 percent saying they were foreign-born and 27.9 percent saying they spoke a language other than English in their homes) in the 2000 Census.

THOSE FIGURES ARE only going to go up once we get the figures compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau in next year’s study.

Debating such resolutions as treating immigration as trespassing just seems too much like trying to live in the past – one that has the potential to hold back this country’s further development.

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NOTICIAS de LATINO: Partisan politics creates fun food feature

It’s not every day that mofongo and chicharones get into the newspaper, and even then, it usually is a mere reference in some sort of feature story about the island culture of Puerto Rico.

So leave it to me to be surprised by the angle for a story that the Houston Chronicle newspaper came up with recently – what kind of food did Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor likely eat when growing up in the Bronx?

THE FEATURE (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/main/6503117.html) RATTLES off some of the primary dishes that constitute Puerto Rican cuisine.

And while I will be the first to admit I don’t care much for the concept of mofongo, I am not about to dismiss it as some sort of disgusting concoction.

After all, I am a fan of the soup known as menudo (not the boy band), and I do realize how some people might think that soup with its use of tripe and pig feet might not sound all too appetizing – even though it is.

So for those who like the idea of seasoned plantains, then perhaps the idea of mofongo isn’t all that strange. In fact, I can’t help but wonder a couple of decades from now how commonplace such dishes will seem to the “All-American” diet.

FOR THAT IS the trend in our society. Those so-called foreign dishes wind up getting adapted into the U.S. diet (just like spaghetti, or much of what many of us think of as Chinese food).

In fact, it already has begun. Take chicharones, which is the skin of the pork fried up into crispy chips. In fact, they often are eaten the same way that some people down potato chips.

For years, I have even noticed chicharones packaged and for sale in the most conventional of grocery stores – only marketed under the name “pork rinds.” It’s too bad because you have to admit, “chicharones” is a much more colorful name.

What other issues of interest to the growing Latino population are cropping up in the news these days?

EL REY DE POP?: I stumbled across a website, Hissip (which purports to offer “Latino gossip like you’ve never read it before”) that tries to establish how influential Michael Jackson was – even among Latinos.

Its evidence amounts to several photographs of the one-time leader of the Jackson 5 taken with entertainers whose ethnic origins derive in Latin American countries.

I’d be inclined to dismiss it as pure trivia, but I must admit that a part of me found it to be a (http://hissip.com/rare-michael-jackson-photos-with-latino-celebrities/7687) bit humorous.

After all, where else is one going to get to see Michael Jackson at his career prime standing side by side with a youthful Ricky Martin (from back in the days when he was with the boy band Menudo – not the soup)?

CARNE ASADA A SUBSTITUTE FOR STEROIDS?: I’m going to steal a line from Gustavo Arellano, who writes the “Ask a Mexican” column that appears in several alternative weekly newspapers across the United States.

When asked about the significant number of Latin Americans and Latinos who are succeeding these days in professional baseball, he suggested that one reason may well be that we have an alternative to the steroids that so many ballplayers of the past decade appear to have used to bulk up.

He cites Fernando Valenzuela, the one-time Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher with the protruding gut (http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-07-01/news/home-run-why-latinos-are-baseball-all-stars/), as evidence of the benefits of a hearty diet of carne asada.

If only that were true. Then I’d have been the ballplayer who wracked up a couple of million dollars during the course of a career. Instead, all I have is the gut.

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