Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

You asked, "So why the uptick in anti-illegal hysteria now?" Is that a rhetorical question or are you honestly puzzled? The answer is obvious. Anti-illegal hysteria is about economic uncertainty, always has been. Illegals provide a convenient scapegoat in bad times, just like Muslims (and in the past, Jews). Disturbing and at moments frightening? Yes. A mystery? No.

Another writes:

William Finnegan has perhaps the best synopsis in a New Yorker piece from a couple weeks ago: "Yet anti-immigrant backlashes don’t always track closely with actual immigration. They track with unemployment, popular anxiety, and a fear of displacement by strangers."

Another recommends this piece by John Judis from a few months back. Another writes:

Simple: Election year race-baiting.  It's the current evolution of the Southern Strategy, and is part and parcel with the freak-out over the New Black Panther Party, the attempt to make Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP into a scandal, and the fear-mongering over the "ground zero mosque."

Another:

From my perspective as an Arizona resident, the hysteria here has been steady for at least the past six years, well before the recession.

Russell Pearce, the GOP state senator who loves to dress himself in the American flag, has been the sponsor of every anti-illegal measure that's come down the pike this decade. As an anti-illegal immigrant zealot and media opportunist, he is matched locally only by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. For the bills that don't pass, Pearce and his GOP allies just convert them into ballot initiatives for the voters to approve, which they always do overwhelmingly. Pearce now has national allies like Kris Kobach, a former Kansas City law professor and current GOP candidate for Kansas secretary of state who helped draft SB1070. The next act in Pearce's legislative assault will take on the 14th Amendment and push a bill to prohibit Arizona from issuing a birth certificate to a child born here if one of the parents is undocumented. The unhinged right has a memorably derisive catch phrase, as they often do, for these U.S.-citizens: anchor babies.

When Janet Napolitano was governor, she served as a balance against the legislative excesses of our GOP-controlled legislature and vetoed some of these bills, just as she no doubt would have in the case of SB1070 had she still been in office. After Napolitano was tapped by Obama as secretary of Homeland Security, her successor stipulated by the constitution was secretary of state Jan Brewer, a Republican who ironically has always opposed that line of succession because it could lead to a replacement governor who was not of the same party or ticket that the voters had placed in office. Brewer has long favored creating an office of lieutenant governor, the candidate for which would run on the same ticket as the governor. (This is now a proposition that will appear on our ballot in November.)

But to return to your original question, this anti-immigrant hysteria is just another instance in the long tradition of desperate politicians who appropriate easy targets of popular disapproval to shift attention from their own shortcomings and bolster their chances for election. With Bush, the symbol was gay couples kissing in front of city halls and courthouses. With Gingrich, the symbol is an Islamic mosque in proximity of Ground Zero. And with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer – who never vocally supported SB1070 before or after it passed our legislature until the day she signed it into law – it's the symbol of illegal immigrants in our midst, and the fear that they're threatening our culture and taking our jobs. It's a fear she finds the need to embellish, in light of Arizona's dismal economy, with her patently false claims that most illegal immigrants enter our state as drug-smuggling human mules, and that their beheaded corpses are showing up in our desert. And John McCain is right along with her in spreading the hysteria, saying on Bill O'Reilly's show that SB1070 was necessary, among other reasons, because illegal immigrants are "intentionally causing accidents on our freeways".

Does any of this come as a surprise in light of the fact that Republicans control Arizona's legislature and Arizona now has, on a per-capita basis, the largest budget deficit of any state in the nation?

 
Chart from Clusterstock. Avent frowns at a chart from the Minneapolis Fed:

With the latest GDP data release, and new data revisions going back to the end of 2006, America's latest recession has cemented its status as clearly the worst of the postwar period.

Ezra Klein:

We'd thought the GDP grew by 0.4 percent in 2008. Now the Commerce Department says it flatlined. All this is worrying on two levels: First, bad economic news is bad economic news. And second, if you're a business deciding whether the economy is strong enough for you to begin taking risks again, there's not a lot here that'll push you off the ledge.

Peter Boockvar:

Q2 Nominal GDP was above forecasts and while it was heavy on government help and light on consumer spending, it wasn’t as alarming as the market made it out to seem initially. Of course 2011 is a different story when a lot of the government stimulus flames out and, with tax policy may reverse some.

Floyd Norris:

I still think the recovery is going to pick up steam, not lose it…The private sector is investing at a rapid rate. This is the third consecutive quarter in which real private investment rose at an annual rate of over 25 percent.  The second quarter number was 23.9 percent over the figure for the same quarter of 2009.  The last time that figure rose as rapidly was in 1984, in the midst of a very strong recovery.

Calculated Risk:

If things go well, the economy will be back to pre-recession levels in the 2nd half of 2011. No wonder there is so little investment. And no wonder there is so little hiring!

James Pethokoukis:

Politically,  the issue is not whether the U.S. economy will slip into a double-dip recession — though it is hardly out of the question for a negative GDP quarter to pop up this year.  It’s how the economy will impact voter mood in 100 days. Will they think America is back on track toward prosperity with growth below trend and unemployment hovering around double digits? That seems unlikely to me.

James Hamilton:

Exports and nonresidential fixed investment were relative bright spots. But could they be enough to carry the economy into a sustained recovery without inventories and fiscal stimulus? The most pessimistic participant at the June FOMC meeting was calling for 2.9% real GDP growth for 2010 as a whole.

But I'll be relieved if we end up doing that well.

The WSJ rounds up reactions from economists. Here's Jay Feldman:

In the recoveries following the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s, real GDP averaged 7% in the first year. Real GDP is up 3.2% from the recession low in the current recovery – not even half as powerful as those episodes. Still, today’s recovery is beating the recoveries following the mild recessions of the early 1990s and 2001, where GDP averaged just 2.3% in the first year – hence we are on a better path than the more pessimistic “U-shaped” or “L-shaped” forecasts.

John Curran:

What should really rock the boat is that the Commerce department did revisions across the full span of the pre-recession and post-recession period. While this big a revision across multiple quarters  is not unprecedented, it will be an eye opener to many who commonly compare this recession to ones that occurred in the past two decades. What's now clear is those comparisons were apples to oranges. What we suffered in the past recession—the depth of the contraction— hasn't been seen since the 1940s.

I was never one who believed that Barack Obama could – in a mere two years – repair the enormous damage of decades of unfunded entitlement and defense spending, two disastrously conceived, off-budget and negligently prosecuted wars, a financial market collapse, the worst recession since the 1930s, two burst bubbles in tech and housing, and the importation of torture into the American way of war. Maybe I over-estimated how much the GOP might learn from their appalling record in the new millennium – but that would require an admission of failure that they seem incapable of.

Nonetheless, the sheer difficulties and resistance that Obama has met with – from the FNC propaganda channel to the balls-free liberal press to the utopian activist left and deranged radical right – is remarkable. But, as P.M. Carpenter notes, this is not an inherently bad thing. We need opposition – if a more intelligent and less cynical opposition than we now confront. And no real change has come to America without slowness and resistance and division – as its constitution requires. The filibuster has become, it seems to me, a promiscuously wielded impediment, but in real context, the huge shift Obama has already achieved is quite remarkable:

I direct your attention to American history, from early 19th-century social reforms to the decades-long battle for emancipation to the century's later political-bureaucratic reforms to TR and Wilson's Progressive Era to FDR's New Dealism and to the Great(er) Society envisioned by LBJ. Each level of sociopolitical progress was grinding and grueling and packed with half-measures — because remember, the other side gets its say, too; plus the other side, notwithstanding our oft-proper ridicule, is not always without its own version of idealism, possessed just as passionately.

And now, Barack Obama's correction of a dreadful, 30-year pseudoconservative misadventure. Step by step. Piece by piece. Half-measures by half-measures, which in time will become 60-percent measures, then 80-percent measures …

That, quite simply, is the way it is. Indeed, that's the way it's supposed to be. If genuine conservative genius there ever was, it came in the Founders' Burkean inspiration that true and lasting progress must pass the tests of peaceful struggle and tireless debate. Achieving a national consensus is hard, but it's necessary to progress' durability; vast and overanxious progress in a consensual void only insures its unraveling.

If you backed Obama and want to see real change continue, now is not the time to give up because it's not as easy as you thought it would be. Now is the time to oppose the passionate intensity of his opponents with the reasoned conviction that elected him.

Remember: we are the ones we've been waiting for. Are we really going to substitute pique for purpose and ennui for hope now? By all means criticize when necessary, as I have. But he's the best we've got, and we are lucky to have him.

To paraphrase Mr Krugman this morning,

Mr. Obama may not be the politician of our dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of our nightmares.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

Calama, Chile, 5.30 pm

They work, so why stop using them?:

“I shudder at the thought of a government panel assigning a value to a day of a person’s life,” [Senator David] Vitter said in the news release. “It is sickening to think that care would be withheld from a patient simply because their life is not deemed valuable enough. I fear this is the beginning of a slippery slope leading to more and more rationing under the government takeover of health care that is being forced on the American people.”

The peril he speaks of? A 12-1 vote by an FDA advisory committee recommending that the breast cancer drug Avastin be denied because its side effects were deemed more harmful than its benefits. So the FDA is the new death panel.

Seriously.

A reader writes:

I'm going to go out on a limb and call bullshit on the broken teeth photos.  My theory: Gibson slapped her in the heat of the argument, then she went home, pulled the one veneer off and chipped the other one all on her own.  I've been smashed in the face to the point of having my front teeth chipped.  Along with that kind of trauma comes cut and severely swollen lips, gum damage, and the inability to smile like she is in the photo (which was taken just hours after getting hit). One would have to use their fingers to hold their lips open like that if they just got punched that hard.  None of that appears in her case.  Only the broken veneers.  Piece of cake with a pair of pliers, a little alcohol, and a lot of rage.

A record. And the Taliban continue to advance in the north, as al Qaeda makes a comeback in Iraq, as the country drifts into sectarian paralysis (which the surge was designed to end).

"[M]y children don’t look Hispanic," – Nevada gubernatorial candidate Brian Sandoval, explaining why he doesn't fear his kids would get harassed by Arizona's immigration bill, which he supports.