Important IBD Article Why President Obama De-Selected Saenz

Keep Up the Opposition! It's apparently working! LA Times Blames Investor's Business Daily! I urge all ALIPAC members to bookmark Investor's Business Daily; research and reference its articles for background material.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticle ... 6854898478

Sour Grapes Over The Radical Obama Threw Under The Bus
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, March 27, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Homeland Security: The open-borders crowd is angry the president ditched its radical choice to run the nation's civil-rights division. And it's blaming this paper for his "faintheartedness."

Obama was expected to appoint Thomas Saenz as his top civil-rights cop at the Justice Department, where he would have had power to investigate issues related to illegal immigration, such as voting rights, redistricting, worker documentation and police conduct.

But then, at the last minute, the president deselected him in the face of vocal opposition to Saenz's extremist work for an illegal alien group, whose co-founder has made racist remarks against whites.

The New York Times, for one, complains that we did its man in with our March 5 editorial, "Who's Thomas Saenz?" "An editorial in Investor's Business Daily slimed Mr. Saenz," who's spent his career standing up for the "rights" of illegal immigrants, its editorial board said.

If we slimed Saenz, we did so with solid facts clearly inconvenient to the Times' amnesty-for-illegals agenda.

"The suffering that illegal immigrants endure — from raids to workplace exploitation to mistreatment in detention — is a civil-rights crisis," the paper contended in its editorial.

"Mr. Saenz would have been an ideal candidate to reaffirm values that have been lost in the poisoned debate, had Mr. Obama dared to nominate him."

New York's Anti-Defamation League joined in the Saenz pity party, condemning our piece as "outrageous and shameful" (see letter below).

In Saenz's hometown, Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez blamed the "fiercely anti-immigrant Investor's Business Daily" for causing a furor that "scared off" the White House.

Of course, IBD has consistently championed legal immigration. An earlier L.A. Times news story on the Saenz flap accurately described our position as "anti-illegal immigration."

Too bad Rodriguez didn't read it, or do any independent research, before dismissing as "an old canard" an easily verifiable fact that Saenz worked for a radical Hispanic group.

In fact, Saenz's former employer, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, was founded by three self-described "radical" Chicanos, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

One of them is Mexican-American Mario Obledo, who in 1998 made the following racist statement on a Los Angeles radio show, as confirmed by Snopes.com:

"We're going to take over all the political institutions of California. California is going to become a Hispanic state, and if anyone doesn't like it, they should leave. They ought to go back to Europe."

That same year, Maldef honored Obledo at a California banquet celebrating his years of leadership.

Saenz was Maldef's longtime vice president of litigation before taking his current job as counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is a close friend of Obledo. Villaraigosa chaired the UCLA chapter of a radical sister group, Mecha, whose slogan, "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada," translates as, "For our race, everything. For those outside our race, nothing."

Apparently the Anti-Defamation League doesn't consider such hate speech as "mean-spirited" as our editorial. Of course not. Theirs is politically correct — and protected — hate speech.

Nor apparently does it view a Mexican-American leader's desire to cleanse California of European Americans as "xenophobic," another term it used to label our arguments.

We're not the only ones offended. So are many patriotic Hispanic-Americans. In fact, two Hispanic Democrats formerly allied with Maldef — longtime California State Sens. Gloria Romero and Martha Escutia — now view the group as "racially divisive."

Maldef is the legal activist arm of the reconquista lobby — a network of Hispanic groups that support the reconquest of the American Southwest through illegal immigration.

Maldef sues to get illegal aliens voting rights, welfare, jobs, health care, housing and even driver's licenses and mortgages. It sues to let them loiter in parking lots. It sues to keep them out of jail and from being deported, while suing cops — like Maricopa County (Phoenix area) Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who enforce the nation's laws.

And Saenz was Maldef's chief litigator. He even led the effort to kill Proposition 187 in California against the wishes of 60% of voters. The law would have denied welfare to illegals.

He also fought against the kind of Border Patrol sweeps that many now view as critical to controlling Mexican drug-cartel violence in border states, not to mention infiltration from foreign terrorists.

Maldef doesn't want police enforcing immigration laws in our cities, either. It insists the 12 million-plus criminal fugitives already here deserve amnesty, automatic citizenship (after a nominal fine) and full government benefits, including Social Security.

"U.S. cities and towns are the wrong place to conduct immigration law enforcement," the group says on its Web site. "Local police should devote their resources to public safety and crime prevention, not immigration status."

Maldef is described in the media as the "law firm of the Latino community." But in protecting illegal immigrants, the group is out of touch with the majority of Americans who think all illegal immigrants should be deported, according to polling by the Pew Research Center, which is sympathetic to Latino immigration issues.

The New York Times thinks that illegal immigrants are "suffering." But what about all the American citizens who suffer crimes at the hands of illegal immigrants each year?

Or all the American taxpayers having to bail them out of the mortgages they're defaulting on in California and Nevada and other heavily Hispanic states — thanks to the pressure Hispanic lobbyists applied to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make risky subprime loans to immigrants, requiring neither income nor asset documentation?

Illegal immigration is not the victimless crime its apologists like to think it is.

And now taxpayers may be in for even more suffering. Reportedly, Maldef President John Trasvina, who recently lobbied Congress to do more to assist Latino homeowners, is on tap to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development division that regulates "fair housing" quotas at Fannie and Freddie.

The apologists may get their Maldef man, after all.