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Here are some stories that on the surface may not seem to be linked at all.

Story #1: John Andrews, Colorado media pundit, former president of the Colorado State Senate, and general frothing-at-the-mouth Republican nutbar, went before Congress and in an apparent effort to fight the proposed immigration reform bill, told a weird-ass cock-and-bull story about a mythical radical Islamist paramilitary training camp staffed by (gasp!) illegal aliens (oooh, scary!) that was currently operating in his fair state.  (Ironically enough, there was a radical Sufi sect involved in racketeering in Colorado nearly twenty years ago, but they didn't last very long, didn't have an "anti-American terrorist agenda" but instead went after Hindus and other Muslims they didn't like, and were dealt with most satisfactorally by the law enforcement personnel of the time, without resorting to waterboarding or any other neocon Abu Ghraib fantasies.)

Story #2: The San Francisco Chronicle, which considering their location should friggin' know better, ran without comment an anti-gay story that used as evidence the bogus statements of known liar and bigot Paul Cameron.

Story #3:  A group calling itself "The Coalition for the Future of the American Worker", hiding behind the "blackwash" provided by T. Willard Fair, an African-American member of Jeb Bush's and now Charlie Crist's state Cabinets in Florida, pretends to be standing up for black Americans by attacking undocumented Hispanic immigrants.  The group turns out to be run by Roy Beck, who far from being a civil rights hero is connected to various racist groups.

Figured out the linkages yet?  Here's the ones I've noticed:

– The protagonists in these stories are all conservative Republicans or strongly allied with them. 

– They all don't much care for people who are Not Like Them, be these people gay, brown, or both.

– The mainstream media, far from consistently calling them on their bigotry, generally allows their statements to pass without comment or challenge.

Far from being the "big tent" party they claim to be, the electoral success of the former Party of Lincoln is built on the bedrock of bigotry, and has been for decades, ever since the modern form of what Kevin Phillips would come to call "The Southern Strategy" was first used by none other than George Herbert Walker Bush in his attempt to unseat Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough in 1964. 

It governs all their key policy stances.  Take taxes and social programs, for instance:  They favor low or no taxes and minimal social programs, in finest white-supremacist "bleed the beast" fashion, because they don't like contributing to the common good, don't like seeing their money go to folks with darker skins than theirs (and their skins, especially those of their leading politicians, are pretty darned light), and know that by nurturing and inflaming these bigotries in others, they can convince those others to vote against their own best interests.  They use these same bigotries to attack Latino immigrants, documented or not, as allegedly taking away jobs from American workers — but along with their leader George W. Bush have over the years cut back on enforcing penalties against those companies that exploit immigrant labor.  This allows crooked sweatshop owners to hire immigrant workers at near-slave wages (thus undermining the wages of other workers), put them to work in despicable conditions, and turn them in to the ICE if they dare to speak up about it.  The basic conflict between the business wing, which wants illegals as a cheap and disposable source of labor, and the base, which wants to expel (or execute, as did Michael Wayne Bobo's Alabama militia) all Meskins and put a moat around the US, is starting to tear at the party's foundations.

And, as Bob Somerby noted back in 2002, their good friends in the mainstream media know not to talk about any of this.  Shhh!  It's their dirty little secret.

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  3. WaPo: US Pressure to Freeze Settlements “Complicated” by Bush “Secret Agreement”
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