Hypocrite of the Day

It's that feisty foe of illegal immigration, Lou Dobbs:

Dobbs has continued to advocate an enforcement-first approach to immigration, emphasizing, as he did in a March 2010 interview on Univision, that "the illegal employer is the central issue in this entire mess!"…

But with his relentless diatribes against "illegals" and their employers, Dobbs is casting stones from a house—make that an estate—of glass. Based on a yearlong investigation, including interviews with five immigrants who worked without papers on his properties, The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute have found that Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.

Whole thing here.

Comments

[Johnny Longtorso]

I, as an American, would have gladly shoveled the shit out of the stable of the daughter of one of our Media Masters.

[Mike Laursen]

Thread win on the first post! Well done!

[Aresen]

Horses will sniff each other's shit and then either add their own shit or pee on it.

That seems to work nicely as a metaphor for the media.

[Abdul]

After RFTA'ing, I think the real story is that Dobbs has [A LOT] more money than people with actual talent. How the fuck did that happen?

[?]

He has a talent that people have been willing to pay for? I believe that's how capitalism works. I may be wrong.

[Ramsey]

Nope. Regulatory capture. Like a textbook case.

[MWG]

Sense of humor sensor fail?

[?]

I know it when I see it. Didn't see any.

[Abdul]

Okay, if the question has to be mroe rpecise: who the fuck is willing to pay for that "talent?"

[gaijin]

That is one reason that money is a poor device for keeping score. May be better for settling them though?

[Niggatry]

Meh

[Aresen]

I think you mean "neigh."

[AlmightyJB]

Why does Reason not understand that the rules set out by our masters are for us. Surely one doesn't expect our betters to live by those rules? Get with the program Reason, or I for one will report you to the proper authorities for reeducation.

[Pip]

Since when is Lou Dobbs your master?

Jesus what a dramatic fuck.

[Ramsey]

Too early for sarcasm, huh?

[AlmightyJB]

I just thought he was slow.

[Pip]

If Libertardian shows up today, let him know he owes me both a rim and a blow job.

Lack of congressional action on 2011 income taxes may force the Treasury Department to make unprecedented moves to prevent U.S. workers from seeing large tax increases in their January paychecks.

The issue: 2011 tax-withholding tables. Treasury officials usually release the tables, which determine the take-home pay of millions of wage-earners, by mid-November because it takes payroll processors weeks to adjust their systems before Jan. 1.

But congressional leaders recently postponed voting on taxes until after the election and lawmakers don't reconvene until Nov. 15. The Senate is scheduled to take up several nontax issues when it returns and is expected to leave for Thanksgiving soon after, possibly pushing a vote on taxes into December.

http://online.wsj.com/article/.....Collection

[2010 Voter]

congressional leaders recently postponed voting on taxes until after the election

Every. Incumbent. Out.

[Reality-based community]

How?

[Libertardian]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afViRNSr5wg

[Fist of Etiquette]

I consider Reason magazine hypocrite of the century for not hiring illegals to write these posts. Yeah.

[Radley Balko]

How do you know we don't?

[STEVE SMITH]

STEVE SMITH COULD SAY SOMETHING ABOUT OBVIOUS ESL STATUS OF REASON PROOFREADERS, BUT STEVE SMITH TOO BUSY FORAGING FOR DELICIOUS ACORNS!

[AlmightyJB]

Please don't rape the acorns Steve.

[STEVE SMITH]

STEVE SMITH MAKE NO PROMISES.

[STEVE SMITH]

STEVE SMITH NO RAPE ACORNS BUT LOVE TO RIP OFF NUTS!!!

[AlmightyJB]

Did you give STD's to the bees?

[Fist of Etiquette]

INS is probably watching the Reason rabble-rousers like a hawk. You would have been raided by now.

On the other hand, Cavanaugh does seem to like to pepper his writing with Spanish...

[Mr. FIFY]

INS isn't the only one watching us... thanks a lot, Barry.

[matth]

How do you know they don't? Have you examined the citizenship status of Reason writers?

[John Tagliaferro]

They finally got rid of Weigel. His body of work was a crime in and of itself.

[Jeff]

As is his body.

[mr simple]

Reason staff outside Home Depot: "Hey, amigo. Looking for work? Trabajo? Ok, I need someone to read these blogs, excerpt funny parts and write clever comments about how stupid they are. Comprende?"

[cynical]

They probably just hire them to troll, for our entertainment. Once the illegals started leaving, they had to resort to luring MSNBC watchers here.

[capitol l]

The Irish don't count, Fist. They are too pale to raise the ire of the xenophobes.

[Fist of Etiquette]

How the times have changed.

[creech]

So what's Lou's excuse? He depended on sub-contractors to do the checking? He isn't qualified to identify bogus drivers licenses and ss cards? He is much too busy to worry about I-9 paperwork? The price seemed right?
Maybe now he will appreciate the difficulty employers have to identify the illegals from the legals. Surely,
he isn't an advocate of national identity cards is he?

[Cyto]

I heard the author of the article on NPR this morning. The case is much weaker than it sounds in the article. She's talking about the lawn care company that takes care of his yard and the stable that takes care of his horses.

Of course, it sounds more incriminating to say "contract employees working at his estate" than "people who work for Tru-Green that cut his grass." She could equally have caught him for eating chicken processed by illegals at Purdue Chicken, or having dinner at a restaurant on dishes washed by an illegal.

And yes, he is a supporter of mandatory national instant citizenship verification. I only know this from the interview on NPR, I've never seen his show. The NPR piece was a hit-piece coming from a "get the right-wing guys" point of view, but actually succeeded in having the opposite effect on me. It sounded like a pretty trite and petty "gotcha" investigation - lasting a year! - that yielded almost nothing. But then I haven't been listening to his rants for the last couple of years either.

[Puff-pass]

Let me tell you about Hillary Dobbs. Oh yeah.

[alittlesense]

Poor kid....she looks just like her father.

[John Tagliaferro]

This will turn out to be the same big nothing as the Meg Whitman story. How many of these illegals are they going to expose to criminal prosecution just to sell a few page impressions?

[?]

It's all about hypocrisy (yawn), not immigration.

[John Tagliaferro]

Not even true hypocrisy either.

[Shocked]

He is even more qualified for office now.

[Azathoth]

Ah, so Lou isn't down at the local hardware store picking up Mexicans to mow his lawn on the cheap, while telling us that this is wrong--he's paid companies that have been knowingly or unknowingly hired illegals.

Meg Whitman employed her nanny/maid through a service. The service was supposed to do the verification. Likewise with the Dobbs situation.

Likewise with every single person in the country. All of us have paid for something, at one time or another, from some company that had, knowingly or unknowingly, hired an illegal alien.

Lou Dobbs is opposed to this horribly ubiquitous situation. There is no hypocracy involved.

Why does Reason fall for these lefty idiocies?

[MWG]

"Meg Whitman employed her nanny/maid through a service. The service was supposed to do the verification. Likewise with the Dobbs situation."

For someone as opposed to illegal immigration as Dobbs is, he should have been a little more proactive, if for nothing else other than to avoid even the slightest appearance of hypocrisy on the issue.

Based on the near prohibition of the immigration of poor hispanics, it's pretty safe to assume that anyone with a spanish accent doing your yard work most likely has questionable status. I personally don't give a shit (right of free association and all), but the fact that Dobbs knowingly had illegals working on his property IS hypocrisy.

[Azathoth]

Ah, so in order to avoid charges of hypocrisy from people who can't stand him and would disagree with him with or without hypocrite status, Lou Dobbs must do an extensive background check on any person he associates with to ensure that they are not now, nor have ever been involved in some way with an illegal immigrant.

Of course, if he did that, you'd all just revert to the 'racist' charge.

[MWG]

"Ah, so in order to avoid charges of hypocrisy from people who can't stand him and would disagree with him with or without hypocrite status, Lou Dobbs must do an extensive background check on any person he associates with to ensure that they are not now, nor have ever been involved in some way with an illegal immigrant."

Nope. As I said before, because of the all out prohibition of poor hispanic immigrants, those with questionable legals status aren't that hard to spot. For example, I'd take out a 2nd mortgage on my home to place a bet that the hispanic immigrants who maintain the grounds of the condos I live in aren't here legally. Not because I'm a racist, but because the types of hispanics who can gain legal entry to the US don't come here to do yard work during the summers in AZ.

All Dobbs would need to do, IMO, is send a letter or place a phone call to the company to request that they make sure that anyone they send to his estate is here legally. The company wouldn't even need to comply with the request, but at least Dobbs could argue that he made a 'conscious' effort to avoid hypocrisy.

[Azathoth]

But, it looks like he may have done just that--

The stable owner in Vermont made the statement that she told Dobbs her workers were legal.

And, come on, be honest with yourself, even if he did such a thing, if a single company or associate failed to comply, knowingly or unknowingly, you'd be right there with the rest of them shouting 'hypocrite!'

Because he's Lou Dobbs, anti-immigration warrior.

[Abdul]

To be fair, in the article, they point out that Dobbs criticized the government and corporations that use contractors that don't vet employees for legal status.

[Cyto]

Nah, that's not really fair either. Because we are not talking about a government contractor, we are talking about hiring a company to cut your grass (as an individual). Cities, states and federal agencies have all kinds of laws in place requiring all sorts of "diversity" or minority quotas of their contractors - all of which must be documented. Adding this requirement would cost them nothing.

It is really at an entirely different level to criticize a government that is in charge of immigration law for failing to institute similar controls with respect to the legality of a contractors work force than it is to criticize a single private citizen for the level of vetting done in contracting with a company to cut the grass.

[J Mann]

Look, I don't care about illegal immigration. IMHO, we should apply the law, but I don't care whether that law is 1 million immigrants, 10 million immigrants, or open borders.

That said, the Nation article is terrible. Each section starts out with two paragraphs about how rich the Dobbs are and how hard their ranch hands work, followed by one sentence asserting that those ranch hands are "undocumented."

What's missing, as far as I can tell, is how the undocumented workers got hired.

1) Did they present fraudulent documents? If so, Dobbs is off the hook - it's illegal to scrutinize immigration status if presented with apparently valid documents that satisfy I-9.

2) Did the contractor fail to ask for I-9 documents?

3) If 2, did the contractor lie to Dobbs, or did Dobbs not ask.

I'm not saying Dobbs is clean or dirty - as far as I can tell from the article, there's no way to know.

[DJF]

Actually it looks like the workers worked for contractors who supplied Dobbs with services, they did not work for Dobbs directly.

We also don't know yet if the contractors had told Dobbs if the workers were legal since as their employers they would have been the ones to see their documentation

[Jesse Walker]

Sounds to me like Dobbs set a higher bar for himself than that. From the article:

On CNN in 2007, he called private firms that oppose verification requirements for their contractors' employees "ridiculous."

[Chris Mallory]

Is there any evidence that he opposed having these contractors verify they were hiring people with the right to work in the US? The stable owner in Vermont made the statement that she told Dobbs her workers were legal.
Is there any evidence Dobbs told these contractors to not check the status of their employees?

[DJF]

I have not seen the proposed law but I would guess that such a requirement for the person hiring the contractor would also include the legal right to demand that the contractor comply and would also include ways for the contractor to verify the employees documents.

Maybe Dobbs was supporting this requirement because he knew from personnel experience how hard it was under present law to confirm whether or not employees whether directly hired or hired by contractors were legal?

[rac]

Everyone who has hired a contractor to do a major job on their house has hired an illegal. I chat with them sometimes. Very nice people. Several of them have told me that they recognize that the reason they may never get ahead in this country is because their goal is to settle in their own country. They just want enough money to do it comfortably.

[Warren]

... his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.

You know, it seems every time I hear about someone's children being active in equestrian competition, that someone is a giant douche.

[AlmightyJB]

You probably need to get out more.

[mb]

i can't believe reason jumped on this non-story. what a joke.

[Pip]

Hypocrite of the day? You missed by a long shot. That would be the Ed show guy who was saying that some GOP candidate for Congress was a hypocrite because the candidate is opposed to unemployment insurance has a wife who collected it when she lost her job.

A progressive saying that a woman should live up to her husband's standards takes the hypocracy cake in my book.

[joshua corning]

his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.

Wha?!?!