Morning links

More Big Con highlights from across the web:

• "Greetings, fellow immigrants," President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously announced at a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, to the horror of those proper ladies who joined that august organization precisely to announce their distance from the dirty hordes who'd been polluting our shores ever since. Forgetting FDR's noble message has become something of a national sport for conservatives these days; see this article about Joey Vento, owner of Philadelphia's Jeno's Steaks, the sandwich stand whose sign "THIS IS AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING 'SPEAK ENGLISH'" has made it a station of the cross for those seeking the Republican presidential nomination. A real charmer, these Republicans are kowtowing to: "These illegal invaders," Vento says, "are killing, like, 25 of us a day...molesting about eight children a day...All we're getting is drug dealers and murderers."

And, not surprisingly, such rhetoric has consequences. In Maryland Virginia, Prince William County passed a law turning the municipality into a virtual police state for undocumented immigrants—which has meant that, for all Hispanic immigrants there, "There is a mass panic. Those who haven't already moved away don't dare step outside their houses." The guy who said that owns a language academy, whose enrollment has plummeted from 350 to 60. Speak English? How can they, when they're terrorized if they try to go to language class?

• Here are two stories, on the surface unrelated. Reports the outstanding investigative journalist Sasha Abramsky, California is about to pass a historic threshhold: soon, it will spend more on prisons than it does on colleges and universities. The second story: "More reports are coming in from schools around the country about cases of antibiotic-resistant staph infections." I'm waiting for the article that draws the logical connection: that the staph epidemic were not merely almost certainly incubated in overcrowded prisons and jails, but are a natural consequence of policies that have rocketed our prison rate to the highest in the world. Kudos to Senator Webb for asking the right questions in his recent hearing Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?"

• How are the depredations of Blackwater experienced by soldiers on the ground? Read soldier Robert Bateman's account: "You see, during my own yearlong tour in Iraq, the bad boys of Blackwater twice came closer to killing me than did any of the insurgents or Al Qaeda types. That sort of thing sticks with you."

Conservative failures, all.

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