We wondered why [Brown] didn't mention that [notoriously anti-immigrant] former Gov. Pete Wilson is chairman of [eMeg's] campaign. At least she didn't suggest she’d round 'em all up and deport them. Or did she?

"Illegal immigration is just that, it is illegal," she said. "And we need to make sure we have the workers that the economy needs to grow and thrive," Whitman said. "We live in a rule of law. There is a judicial process, and we have to abide by that. So I think the best thing that I can do to help the Latino community in California is as first and foremost, as I said, jobs."

Brown countered that it's wrong to bring workers in to fill labor shortages and then herd them home.

"This is about human beings. And you don't bring in temporary workers and then when you've used them up, you send them back. ... You don't just bring in semi-serfs and say, 'Do our dirty work,' and then we’re finished with you like an orange and just throw it away. That's after you've squeezed it. That’s not right."

On "path to citizenship" alone, Whitman dug in against a position that 90% of Latinos (and Brown) support. [my emphasis]

[Baratunde:] This question is from Facebook from Martha Elizabeth. Is the President going to call all the Blue Dogs in his office and give each a piece of paper with the amount of stimulus money and say, "I want your vote on healthcare? If you're a Democrat get in line. Otherwise any time you want money in juror [your?] district you can ask Jim De Mint for it?" Wow. Mary Elizabeth!

[Jarrett:] Mary Elizabeth. She has a fan club.

I was going to say. I'm jealous. I haven't got that kind of applause yet. my goodness. The fact of the matter is I know obviously that's hit a note here, and I know that there is a lot of frustration here and around the country, and I'm telling you, I am convinced this president has it right and he is going to continue to go along the way he's going.

He is not one to punish or do any of the kinds of things that perhaps you might want to do in a moment of span [?] the mayty [martyr] or anger but he'll count on the American people to put the pressure on their elected representatives because that's way the system works the best. it doesn't work for him to punish from the Oval [Office].

When you guys get out there - and it's hard work but when you organize and when you, and not just form letters but when you call and - I met a person right as I came in going and having 60 meetings on the hill in the next few weeks with they're elected representatives. Meet them in the district. Go to the town hall meetings and make phone calls and organize your block and audiences and bloggers and put the pressure on them that way. That's how we'll get healthcare done this year. Not quite as much applause, but trust me. It will work. [my emphasis]

For the right-wing think tank, landing such a brilliant, cosmopolitan heroine was a coup. The American right often alleges that liberals, full of mushy-headed cultural relativism, can’t even bestir themselves to defend their own values against reactionary Islam. The liberal intellectual establishment’s rejection of Hirsi Ali appeared, at least on the surface, to bear this out.

That’s certainly what Paul Berman argues in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. "A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist," he writes of Hirsi Ali, asserting that the left’s failure to rally around her is evidence of deep intellectual corruption. Pointing to her liberal critics, particularly the writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, he says, "The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press."

But there is a problem with this perspective. Hirsi Ali is, in many ways, immensely admirable. But she can also be reactionary, glib, and sloppy, and judging by Nomad–a painfully disappointing book–these tendencies have gotten worse since she joined AEI. Nomad brims with attacks on unrecognizable straw feminists, bizarre statements about the United States, and, strangest of all, a tendency to romanticize religions outside of Islam. Hirsi Ali remains, she says, an atheist, but she’s developed an odd admiration for the Catholic Church, which, she suggests, should try to civilize Muslims through conversion. There is in Nomad a new concern for private property and a shout-out to gun rights. She ladles praise on her AEI colleague Charles Murray, author, most famously, of The Bell Curve, which purported to demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of black people.

Hirsi Ali attacks Islam in the name of liberalism, but she’s more than willing to jettison her liberalism for the sake of her anti-Islamism. Perhaps if she had found a home on the left, Hirsi Ali’s thinking would have developed in a different direction. One could blame liberals or feminists or mainstream intellectuals for letting her down, for driving her into the arms of the neoconservatives. But to do so is to condescend to a woman who has always taken responsibility for forging her own path. [my emphasis]

To be blunt, Hirsi Ali has no idea what she’s talking about. Western feminists have consistently stood up for women’s rights in developing countries–including Muslim countries–inspiring endless polemics by both Christian and Muslim conservatives blasting “feminist colonialism.” Long before September 11, the Feminist Majority Foundation was a lonely American voice against the Taliban’s sexual apartheid, and today, the New York-based feminist group Women for Afghan Women runs domestic violence shelters in Afghanistan. The American feminist movement lobbies, fiercely and consistently, for family planning programs in poor countries, including Muslim countries. American feminists–including Muslim feminists–have set up domestic violence shelters that serve women trapped in violent homes in insular religious communities. American feminists have also played a crucial role in the global campaign against female genital mutilation, both by getting the U.S. government to exert its influence on countries reliant on American aid, and by supporting women working in Africa to end the practice.

American conservatives, meanwhile, have consistently attacked programs that help to liberate women in the developing world. They’ve slashed funding for reproductive health clinics abroad, and have put pressure on foreign governments to maintain restrictive anti-abortion laws. They’ve fought efforts to expand women’s rights in international law, helping to ensure that the United States remains one of the few countries that have refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women–putting it in the company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia. In 2007, the evangelical activist Janice Crouse, a Bush delegate to a 2002 United Nations summit on children, attacked the Convention in explicitly relativist terms: "It is like the old colonialism. . . . [H]ere you have the UN taking up the same kinds of principles and saying to countries you have to do things my way. You have to do things in the way of Western nations."

Indeed, when it comes to women’s rights, American conservatives often ally themselves with the very governments Hirsi Ali decries. As Colum Lynch reported in The Washington Post in 2002, "Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences." He quoted a U.S. official saying, "We have tried to point out there are some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic countries on these social issues."

The O'Donnell template [for her public image as a candidate]... is Palin. It was Palin's endorsement that put O'Donnell on the map, and it's Palin's script that O'Donnell is assiduously following. The once obscure governor of Alaska was also tripped up by lies and gaffes when she emerged on the national stage, starting with her misrepresentation of her supposed opposition to "the bridge to nowhere." But she quickly wove the attacks into a brilliant cloak of martyrdom that positioned her as a fierce small-town opponent of the coasts' pointy-head elites. O'Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in "real America." [my emphasis]

By latching on to O'Donnell's growing presence, the Rove-Boehner-McConnell establishment can claim it represents struggling middle-class Tea Partiers rather than Wall Street potentates and corporate titans. O'Donnell's value is the same as that other useful idiot, Michael Steele, who remains at the Republican National Committee only because he can wave the banner of "diversity" over a virtually all-white party that alternately demonizes African-Americans, Latinos, gays and Muslims.

O'Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O'Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don't extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs. [my emphasis]

Levin met Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and other officials Thursday. They discussed improved accuracy of U.S. drone attacks on terrorists targets inside Pakistan, Levin told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States has intensified attacks on terrorists but while also increasing efforts to limit civilian casualties.

"There is a significant improvement in the accuracy. The minister, the foreign minister of Pakistan, acknowledged this yesterday to me," Levin said. "There are mistakes made but there is a huge improvement in the accuracy and the reduction of mistakes."

"They object when we make mistakes," Levin said. "I mean we hit some Pakistani troops by mistake the other day and there is some strong blowback on that," he said. "This is understandable."