Happy (Illegal) Immigrants vs. “Outraged” “Conservatives”
 

     Collectively, the New York Times’ articles on the rallies in support of illegal immigrants would make for neat souvenir programs for marchers to take home. As examples of balanced journalism, however, they are feeble indeed.

     Nina Bernstein covered Monday’s march in New York City by illegal immigrants and their supporters, and managed to avoid the term “illegal” until her 12th paragraph. “The hotel housekeeper from El Salvador had taken a precious day off from cleaning up after tourists. The Senegalese street vendor had sacrificed an afternoon's sales. And the man with the hand-lettered sign that asked, ‘Did Pilgrims Need Green Cards?’ was an American-born asbestos-removal worker who had come to show support for union colleagues from Poland and the Dominican Republic. Other immigrant rallies held across the country yesterday may have been larger, but none was more diverse than New York's, as thousands converged at City Hall Park in brilliant sunshine to demand a path to citizenship for all.”

     Bernstein throws in lots of “diverse” details: “The crowd heard invocations by the leader of a Buddhist temple and a rabbi who waved a matzo. They danced to salsa and to a Korean drumbeat supplied by a troupe in traditional dress, as tourists gawked from double-decker buses. They heard not only from both of New York's United States senators, but also from a Broadway actress and a Harvard-educated union leader who had cajoled Chinese waiters and garment workers to join the march despite fears of deportation.

     "‘Your faces are the faces of America,’ said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is running for re-election this year and is seen as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

     “Mrs. Clinton was cheered early in the four-hour rally when she thanked the rallying immigrants for their everyday work. ‘Your faces are the faces of those who give us a fair day's work -- and often not for a fair day's pay,’ she said.”

     What Bernstein doesn’t get into is Clinton’s utter flip-flop on illegal immigration. Back in 2004, after Bush’s reelection, she told Manhattan’s WABC radio: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants. Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country, and one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry-and-exit system so that if we're going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let's have a system that keeps track of them….People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”

     Bernstein hails one marcher for the courage of showing up to a rally where no citizenship enforcement agents were in attendance: “For some, just showing up took courage. One man who marched on the Brooklyn Bridge, Manuel Gomez, 32, a carpenter, acknowledged that as an illegal immigrant, he was nervous about showing his face. ‘But we have no choice,’ he said.”

     Reporter Rachel Swarns’ lead story took a nationwide look at the marches in American cities. “Waving American flags and blue banners that read ‘We Are America,’ throngs of cheering, chanting immigrants and their supporters converged on the nation's capital and in scores of other cities on Monday calling on Congress to offer legal status and citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants….Over and over again, construction workers, cooks, gardeners, sales associates and students who said they had never demonstrated before said they were rallying to send a message to the nation's lawmakers.”

     Swarns finally worked in the other side, briefly noting the opinions of “outraged” “conservatives.”

     “The demonstrations, while cheered by advocates for immigrants, have meanwhile fueled a sharp response from critics who have expressed outrage at the images of immigrants, some of them illegal, demanding changes in American laws.

     “Talk of the marches has been burning up the airwaves on talk radio and cable news networks and has appeared in Internet blogs and conservative publications. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, described the protests with marchers carrying foreign flags as ‘ominous’ in ‘their hint of a large, unassimilated population existing outside America's laws and exhibiting absolutely no sheepishness about it.’”

     Then it was back to flattering scenes of the happy marchers and their unlabeled liberal supporters.

     “In Washington, demonstrators carried children on their shoulders, ate popcorn and draped themselves in the banners of their homelands as they cheered Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who told them that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken here in 1963, and a host of other speakers, including John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington.

     “Across the street from the rally, about half a dozen people held signs that read, ‘Illegals Go Home.’

     “But the small counterprotest failed to douse the spirits of the demonstrators, many of whom seemed almost giddy with their newfound sense of political power.

     "‘Today we march,’ they chanted. ‘Tomorrow we vote!’’

For the rest of Bernstein on the march in Manhattan, click here.

For more of Swarns on the nationwide marches, click here.

Rep. Mollohan: He’s No “Duke” Cunningham
 

     National reporter Jodi Rudoren (formerly Jodi Wilgoren, and therein lies a tale) has a Saturday front-page story on yet another investigation of a congressman, Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia.

     “As lawmakers have increasingly slipped pet projects into federal spending bills over the past decade, one lawmaker has used his powerful perch on the House Appropriations Committee to funnel $250 million into five nonprofit organizations that he set up. Those actions have prompted a complaint to federal prosecutors that questions whether any of that taxpayer money helped fuel a parallel growth in his personal fortune.

      “The most ambitious effort by the congressman, Alan B. Mollohan, is a glistening glass-and-steel structure with a swimming pool, sauna and spa rising in a former cow pasture in Fairmont, W.Va., thanks to $103 million of taxpayer money he garnered through special spending allocations known as earmarks.”

     Notice anything missing? Right.

     Although the rumor around D.C. is that Mollohan is a Democrat, Rudoren doesn’t inform us of that fact until this casual line in the eighth paragraph: “The case has led several Republican leaders to call for Mr. Mollohan's removal from the House ethics committee, where he is the senior Democrat.”

     Contrast that with how readily Carl Hulse reported the Republican status of Rep. Randy Cunningham in one of the first stories on the now-jailed congressman’s legal woes, from July 15, 2005: “Under investigation for a real estate deal and his ties to a military contractor, Representative Randy Cunningham, an eight-term Republican, announced Thursday that he would not seek re-election next year in his district in the San Diego area.”

     And John Broder’s November 29, 2005 lead left no doubt as to Cunningham’s party affiliation. “Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican from San Diego, resigned from Congress on Monday, hours after pleading guilty to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes to help friends and campaign contributors win military contracts.”

For more of Rudoren on Mollohan, click here.

Bumiller Defends Gay Parents from Bush
 

     Monday’s “White House Letter” from reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, “The Egg Roll (Again!) Becomes a Stage for Controversy” is on the prospect of gay families as a group joining the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House.

     Bumiller called the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which criticized the gays, as “an influential conservative group,” and called The Weekly Standard magazine “conservative,” but gave no labels to the other side.

     The Times’ White House reporter also puts in her two cents on the psychological health of gay families: “Last year, Mr. Bush upset gay parents even more when he said in an interview with The New York Times that while ‘children can receive love from gay couples,’ he believed that ‘studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman.’ Afterward, experts across the political spectrum countered that there was no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples did any worse -- socially, academically or emotionally -- than their peers raised in more traditional households.”

For more from White House reporter Bumiller on gays and the Easter Egg Roll, click here.

Hiding the Kennedy Clan’s Hypocritical Aversion to Windmills
 

     Cornelia Dean’s Saturday story, on a decision by a congressional committee that appeared to doom prospects for a wind farm on Nantucket, hides the handiwork of liberal Massachusetts politicians who support environmental principles in the abstract but then work to keep unsightly windmills out of their own rich backyards.

     Dean notes mildly: “The proposal won the support of many environmental groups and lawmakers. But many Massachusetts politicians of both parties have long objected to the proposal, saying Nantucket Sound, a major attraction for the region's tourism-based economy, is a poor site for so large an industrial installation. Others argued that nothing so elaborate should be built in federal waters until the government had established a way to regulate them.”

     Of course, all congressmen in Massachusetts are Democrats, and the party still dominates state politics (the governor’s office is an exception), so Dean’s formulation is a convenient way to mask the fact that the generally “pro-environment” Democrats are playing a hypocritical game of NIMBY.

     There’s no mention that Sen. Ted Kennedy opposes the wind farm (as Reuters reported, the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport is six miles away from the proposed site of the windmills), or that Robert F. Kennedy, his environmentalist nephew, also opposes it.

For the full Dean, click here.