Lou Barletta

Picture this: you are the mayor of a small city in Pennsylvania's Anthracite coal mining region. Municipal revenues are down, the economy isn't producing jobs, the costs of providing city services keeps going up and your population is on a steady decline into oblivion. What do you do?

Well, if you are Lou Barletta, you start a crusade against illegal immigrants. Forget little "technicalities" such as:

• That the closest international border to your city is hundreds of miles away...it happens to be the U.S, Canadian border...and we haven't had too many problems with Canadians swimming Lake Erie to get here
• Only the Federal Government can enforce immigration law anyway
• The only growing segment of your city's population lies in the group you are trying your best to alienate
  

No, by starting this little crusade, you ensure that at least hard-working, narrow-minded white people will still like you. Oh, and those folks vote. Oh, and your little crusade will make you the darling on the modern-day version of the "Know Nothing" party set.

If I sound unnecessarily harsh in this post, then so be it. I have ZERO TOLERANCE in my life for racist swine, period. While I can't look into Mr Barletta's heart to know for certain that he is a racist, I can offer the following bit of evidence:

One of Mr Barletta's proposals was that landlords were to validate the citizenship of prospective tenants ("The act imposes a $1,000-per-day fine on any landlord who rents to an illegal immigrant"...link here). A landlord, "Bob" has an apartment to rent. Two prospective tenants approach him about the apartment...Carol (white, non-Hispanic) and Pedro (Hispanic). Now who is Bob more likely insist on seeing "papers" for? Hell, who is more likely to get the apartment, assuming that Bob is not even motivated enough (or scared of the $1000/day fine) to even want to see "papers"? How is that not racism in action?

I am not a fan of Paul Kanjorski, however the GOP needs to offer up something better than a race-baiter as an alternative.