Jane Fonda-funded GALEO was – and as far as we know, still is – a member of the ‘Cobb United For Change Coalition ‘

(Above: Cobb’s Rich Pellegrino)

which includes not only another leftist “group” headed by the same Rich Pellegrino quoted below, but also the Marietta Nation of Islam organization. See HERE  (or here) for info on the fact that the SPLC has listed the latter group on their 2012 (we love this one) “hate group” list. Shorter: In addition to smearing the Cobb sheriff and other elected officials, GALEO has ties to SPLC-designated “hate groups.”  GALEO associate Pellegrino has taken the stage at the same event as American terrorist, Bill Ayers.

See the below news report:

Marietta Daily Journal

Activists go after Cobb sheriff, say actions politically motivated
by By Kathryn Dobies and Jon Gillooly

May 15, 2010 1

ATLANTA – Immigration activists at Jessica Colotl’s Friday press conference called for Cobb Sheriff Neil Warren’s resignation and went after several local and state politicians.

Activists and members of human rights groups joined Colotl – an illegal immigrant and Kennesaw State University student – and denounced Warren’s recent actions, calling them politically motivated.

“It’s really unfortunate that her family has been used by ‘Wild West Warren’ for a political ploy to score political points,” said Jerry Gonzalez, executive director for the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials. “It’s shameful that a law enforcement official would use the rule of law and the authority given to him by Cobb County voters to abuse that power and to create a massive manhunt for a college student, a non criminal.”

(Photo above: Jerry Gonzalez, GALEO Executive Director)

Warren maintains that he was enforcing the law, as is his duty under oath, and was not encouraged by anyone to pursue the situation.

Colotl, 21, was stopped on KSU campus March 29 for a traffic violation and later arrested for driving without a valid license. After Colotl was booked into Cobb Jail, she was turned over to immigration authorities. She was taken to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala., on April 1, but was released May 5. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities agreed to defer any action against her for one year so she could return to her studies at the university.

On Wednesday evening, however, the Cobb Sheriff’s Office obtained a warrant for Colotl on a felony charge of lying to law-enforcement officials, based on a reportedly false address she provided upon her book-in at the Cobb County Jail in March. On Friday morning, Colotl turned herself into Cobb authorities and was released on a $2,500 bond.

Rich Pellegrino, of Cobb Immigrant Alliance, said his group would soon be asking for Warren’s resignation.

“Next week we will be releasing information we have documented proof that Sheriff Neil Warren has been selectively enforcing the law, looking to the side when other people have identity issues, other people who are friends of his have identity documents, false documents, we will be releasing that next week and calling for the resignation and removal of Sheriff Neil Warren,” Pellegrino said.

Gonzalez even called for President Barack Obama to step in, asking him to take away an agreement, known as 287(g), which Cobb County has with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to check the immigration status of everyone booked into the county jail. The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office was the first agency in Georgia to participate in 287(g). Since July 2007, Warren’s office has identified more than 6,600 inmates who were in the United States illegally. Warren signed a new 287(g) agreement in October 2009.

In defense of his latest actions, Warren said Friday that his staff went to the Duluth address that Colotl provided to his department during her first book-in and met with the manager of Century Park Apartments, only to find that Colotl did not live there.

“I have all the confidence in the world that my investigators did a thorough investigation,” Warren said. “And they presented a case to the magistrate, and the magistrate judge felt there was probable cause to issue the warrant. So it’s time for us to let the courts and the judge decide … We started getting calls and I felt obligated to look into it. I did not have any encouragement to do anything.”

Warren said he has no intentions of resigning.

Regarding Colotl’s late March booking in Cobb Jail and the tools used to determine the status of an inmate, Warren said, “some may think it is unfortunate that minor offenders are caught in the 287(g) net; but I value any tool that helps me enforce the law and remove violators from our community. Georgia law establishes legal criteria for every potential offender, from traffic violations thru capital felony murder. Often individuals have different perceptions or personal definitions of criminal activity. I follow the Georgia Code and enforce those statutes. That is my oath of office and duty to the citizens of Cobb County.”

Following Friday’s press conference, Christopher Taylor, Colotl’s attorney, was critical of the Journal for its reporting, saying the Journal was responsible for Colotl’s second arrest.

“I believe the Marietta Daily Journal and the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office misreported this issue,” Taylor said. “I’ve got a problem with the Marietta Daily Journal … Reporting that she gave a false address caused a fire storm.”

However, the Journal brought Colotl’s story to light on May 1 because her friends and sorority sisters from Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority reached out to the newspaper, asking for coverage of a march for Colotl at the state Capitol.

In an attempt to contact Colotl, the Journal called her previous attorney, Kazuma Sonoda, of the Sonoda Law Firm, sent her a message via Facebook and finally went to the Duluth address she provided to authorities on May 7. At the address, a woman answered and said she still receives mail for Colotl, but has never met the KSU student.

Taking jabs at politicians Friday, Gonzalez said, “(Former) U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal has said he wants to bring Arizona along to Georgia as governor. (Former) state Sen. Eric Johnson wants to ban access to college education to deserving students like Jessica. They want to kick them out of school. Is that the kind of Georgia that we want?”

Johnson, a Republican candidate for governor, on Friday challenged a statement from the chancellor of the University System of Georgia that it would be too costly to require verifying citizenship when a student goes through the admissions process.

“This is a typical bureaucratic response. First and foremost, we cannot afford to simply ignore the law, and it is unacceptable to brazenly dismiss the responsibility of enforcement,” Johnson said. “… It does not cost a dime to ask for a valid driver’s license, valid passport, or valid student visa.”

KSU officials have said that Colotl was receiving in-state tuition since she graduated from a Georgia high school.

Gonzalez went on to say that Georgia has “no leadership from both of our U.S. senators.”

“Where is Saxby Chambliss and where is Johnny Isakson? Instead of saying no on immigration reform, why are they not working to move forward with a workable solution that moves us together as a nation to uphold our values as a nation? (Isakson) You are up for re-election sir. There are a 160,000 Latinos registered to vote. We are paying attention to this issue,” he said.

In response, Isakson told the Journal, “I have always drawn a clear distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and anyone who comes to our country legally should be welcomed to share in the pursuit of the American dream. At the same time, the defense of our nation begins with securing our borders and ending the opportunity for illegal entry. Our immigration laws must be followed and they must be enforced, and I stand in full support of those who do both.”

*Read more: The Marietta Daily Journal – Activists go after Cobb sheriff say actions politically motivated

*Under then new content editor, J.K. Murphy, the MDJ paid to have its website upgraded, but did not have a backup on place. Years worth of news and opinion were lost, even when checking the Wayback Machine. This report was one of the lost.

dak

REASON

Short of Actually Scary People, SPLC Targets Anarcho-Capitalists

I have to assume that it’s fundraising time at the Southern Poverty Law Center, because Morris Dees and company have gone looking for new people to label enemies of the republic. This time, they’ve found those long underappreciated serpents nesting in our midst, notorious fellow-travelers of the Patriot Movement knows as … anarcho-capitalists?

That even SPLC writer Leah Nelson, may think her organization is reaching a bit far with this one might be indicated by the oddly passive title of the piece, “‘Anarcho-Capitalists’ Seen as Cousins of the ‘Patriot’ Movement.” They are? By whom? Oh. You mean the SPLC sees them as “cousins” yada yada and somehow potentially dangerous and hateful…

More grins HERE

Slime, slimed by the slime – Angry Jerry gets a new and well-deserved name: “Angry Jerry-with-ties-to- a- hate- group Gonzalez”

According to the SPLC, Jerry Gonzalez, Executive Director of the anti-enforcement Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and well-known, far- left smear artist has ties to a designated hate group. Namely, the Marietta branch of the Nation of Islam.

It is my great pleasure to write about recent news concerning GALEO’s Gerado E. (Jerry) Gonzalez from the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center and their latest release of their annual fund-raising “hate map” (I am not making this up, they really publish a national map of what they say are “groups” that “hate” – they even have them divided up into categories). Not many rational people pay much attention this nonsense.

But for the illegal alien lobby, it is a large part of their tool box. “Ties to hate groups” is the constant, baseless and shrill howl made in endless hope that pro-enforcement Americans’ message of demanding an equal application of Americvan immigration laws. Even for illegal aliens. Even for Hispanics.

You can read more HERE until I get time to write more. What a hoot!

AL.com

Discredited open-borders group launches new propaganda campaign

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery which is providing legal assistance to plaintiffs suing to block Alabama’s immigration law, released a three-minute video today urging other states to avoid similar legislation. — The video is titled “Remember Alabama” and outlines problems the law has created for farmers. It also notes the embarrassment surrounding the arrest of a German Mercedes Benz worker.

HERE

HERE

HERE

The open borders mob lost another battle in Georgia. This is a feeble attempt to marginalize the majority of Americans who want sustainable, reasonable, traditional and lawful immigration that benefits the USA.

LET ME MAKE THIS CRYSTAL CLEAR: DR. JOHN TANTON IS A LONG-TIME RESPECTED PERSONAL FRIEND AND HERO.

Please see our Mission Statement
HERE

The Dustin Inman Society endorsed by the parasitic hustlers at the Southern Poverty Law Center!

WE THANK MORRIS DEES et al FOR THE NOTE AND THE ENDORSEMENT!

DIS listed as a successful SPLC “nativist extremeist” group for opposing illegal immigration and illegal employment! READ about the SPLC and their cheap smears HERE and HERE!

“…Mr. (Morris) Dees, in fact, earns — or is paid, which is not necessarily the same thing — more than nearly any officer of other advocacy groups surveyed by the National Journal, more than the chairmen of the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Children’s Defense Fund.
“You are a fraud and a con man,” Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which actually takes on dozens of death-penalty appeals for poor blacks every year, once told him. “You spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.”

HERE

From these discredited scumbags, this listing is a real gem of a compliment – and it proves we have all the right enemies! ( I don’t know if this is new for 2011 or a re-list, but we will take it!)

“…the SPLC defines as “nativist extremist” groups — organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected (they mean “illegal” – dak) immigrants or their employers — rose slightly, despite the fact that most of their key issues had been taken up by mainstream politicians

. HERE

Associated Press

Lawmaker says Hispanic “immigrants” are hardest workers

An African-American lawmaker in South Carolina said Tuesday that stricter illegal immigration laws would hurt the state because blacks and whites don’t work as hard as Hispanics. — State Sen. Robert Ford made his remarks during a Senate committee debate over an Arizona-style immigration law… HERE

Tolerance Mafia

Who watches the hate watchers?
By W. James Antle III

Ken Silverstein is an unlikely ally for those trying to get control of the nation’s borders. A liberal journalist, he finds the Minutemen “crackpots” and Arizona’s immigration-hawk Sheriff Joe Arpaio a “kook” whose activities are “reprehensible.” Silverstein’s wife is Dominican, and he freely admits he does not know whether she originally came to America legally. Yet there he was at the National Press Club on a panel sponsored by the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

“I have different immigration views than the center,” Silverstein said in his presentation. “But I don’t believe I have a monopoly on wisdom.” What he does believe is that free speech is too important to be shouted down by ersatz civil-rights organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The SPLC squelches free speech and free debate,” Silverstein argued. And, he would add, they raise an awful lot of money from unsuspecting liberals in the process.

Silverstein was there to mark the release of a powerful CIS report entitled “Immigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped its Donors.” On that last point, Silverstein is something of an expert: he wrote “The Church of Morris Dees” story for Harper’s a decade ago documenting how Dees, the SPLC’s founder, had enriched himself by posing as a defender of racial equality against a rising tide of hate.

What calling could be nobler than working against the cross-burning knuckle-draggers of the Ku Klux Klan? But the country that elected Barack Obama president is not the America of “Mississippi Burning.” Organizations like the Klan have been thoroughly marginalized, their racist ideologies soundly rejected by Americans of all colors and creeds. To raise money as if they constitute anything more than an unpleasant reminder of our Jim Crow past is to perpetuate a fraud.

That’s why Dees and his merry band of politically correct enforcers have had to branch out, endlessly expanding the list of “hate groups” to include perfectly mainstream organizations with which they disagree. Advocates of reduced immigration levels and stronger border security are high on the SPLC’s list of targets because of the obvious racial component of the immigration issue.

Locating cranks who have made ill-tempered remarks about immigrants is not terribly difficult work for highly trained members of the thought police. But Morris Dees’s marauders have not been content to stop there. In late 2007, the SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a hate group. This troubling designation by extension tarred organizations like CIS and Roy Beck’s NumbersUSA—and quickly achieved its intended chilling effect on the immigration debate.

The SPLC’s smear became the centerpiece of the National Council of La Raza’s “Stop the Hate” campaign. “Hate” was loosely defined as any position that differed from La Raza’s advocacy of loose borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants. La Raza used the SPLC’s “findings” to try to silence its critics, and the mainstream media, always eager to portray conservatives as racists, cheerfully repeated the slur in its woefully biased coverage of the amnesty debate. Stop the Hate claimed its biggest scalp when Lou Dobbs stepped away from his microphone at CNN—by most accounts, a voluntary move, but one hastened by the network’s growing discomfort with the controversy surrounding Dobbs’s outspoken views on immigration.

FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA are far from hate groups. They are wonky, white-paper-generating organizations committed to nothing more controversial than cutting back immigration from its post-1965 high of 1 million new immigrants a year to the more traditional level of 300,000. They shy away from the more racially charged aspects of the debate, which reflects their roots in the wing of the immigration-restrictionist movement animated primarily by environmental and economic concerns rather than blood and soil.

But such facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of a good fundraising mailing—or a malicious attempt to drum certain viewpoints out of polite society. In its fevered writings about immigration reformers, the SPLC has concocted conspiracies so elaborate they would raise eyebrows within the John Birch Society. While the Birchers have David Rockefeller, the SPLC has Michigan environmental activist John Tanton: the “puppeteer” supposedly pulling the strings whenever leading immigration reformers Mark Kirkorian and Roy Beck speak, the all-purpose explanation for why seemingly colorblind arguments against mass immigration can be readily dismissed as thinly disguised racism.

Krikorian’s CIS decided to strike back. Senior fellow Jerry Kammer, a respected journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for helping to uncover the Congressman Duke Cunningham bribery scandal, wrote their report slashing much of the SPLC’s work to ribbons. “The SPLC’s decision to smear FAIR was the work of a kangaroo court, one convened to reach a pre-determined verdict by inventing or distorting evidence,” Kammer wrote. “The ‘Stop the Hate’ campaign would more accurately be labeled as a campaign to ‘Stop the Debate.’” The tactic is so effective that liberals have begun deploying it in debates on issues with no obvious racial connotations—healthcare reform, deficit spending, and Tea Party protests.

Without denying either the SPLC’s good early work on civil rights or the existence of bad actors in the immigration-reform movement, Kammer shows that Dees is no nonpartisan, dispassionate observer of the immigration debate, which may explain why the SPLC only detects hate on one side of the issue despite ample evidence of racist remarks by La Raza radicals. Kammer also skillfully debunks the SPLC’s immigration conspiracy theory, conceding that Tanton has occasionally been reckless in his statements and associations but documenting that the SPLC has inflated both the charges against the early immigration reformer and his influence on the contemporary movement.

Kammer’s report also focuses on an aspect of the SPLC long denounced by liberal magazines and newspapers—the excessive fundraising that has won Morris Dees a place in the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame but no comparable honor in the civil-rights movement. The SPLC took in over $32 million in contributions in 2008, an average of $88,755 per day. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, the SPLC had more than $174 million in the bank even after its investments lost over $48 million in the financial crisis.

The CIS report claims Dees promised to stop his profligate fundraising after the SPLC’s endowment exceeded $50 million, but continued shaking the money tree after it reached $200 million. The group’s lavish headquarters, nicknamed the “Poverty Pentagon,” have made it a laughingstock among erstwhile allies on the Left. The Nation called Dees “a millionaire huckster”; left-wing journalist Alexander Coburn dubbed him the “arch-salesman of hatemongering.” “Morris Dees does not need your financial support,” Silverstein wrote in Harper’s. “The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America. … The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the SPLC one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors.”

“Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC’s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s,” JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in The Nation in 2001. “Why the organization continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.” At the CIS event, Silverstein quoted a civil-rights attorney as calling Dees’s operation “the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the civil-rights movement. And I don’t mean to demean Jim and Tammy Faye.”

Even some of the SPLC’s legitimate civil-rights work was exploited for profit. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million verdict against a Klan group that had brutally murdered a young black man. The Montgomery Advertiser reported that the SPLC “used nationwide fund-raising letters to create the image of a mighty Klan that actually had $7 million” to pay the victim’s mother. In fact, the woman only received about $52,000, most of which she had to pay back to the SPLC, which had given her an interest-free loan. Meanwhile, the SPLC raised $9 million in two years from mailings highlighting her case.

The SPLC’s antics, ranging from the above outrage to the merely absurd—Dees signing fundraising letters to Jewish potential donors as “Morris Seligman Dees”—harm more than guilty liberals’ wallets. To the extent that our current immigration policy is not in the national interest, the SPLC stands in the way of a solution. And it may ultimately foster the racism it claims to oppose.

Consider the case of Carol Swain, an African-American law professor at Vanderbilt who has been sounding the alarm about “the new white nationalism.” Because she approaches the subject from a scholarly rather than a fundraising perspective, she has raised the SPLC’s hackles. “When my face was smeared across the papers in my state with accusations that I was an apologist for white supremacy, I thought it was time to get involved,” Swain said at the CIS press conference. Driving the immigration debate underground, she argued, will silence legitimate restrictionists and empower genuine racists.

Swain concluded, “If we are concerned about extremists, the best thing we can do is include their voices in the dialogue. … [The SPLC] is actually making more converts to extremist organizations than they would if they let them talk about their concerns.” For years, Morris Dees has been expanding the number of hate groups on his fundraising lists. It would be a tragic result if his tactics helped them proliferate in real life.

HERE__________________________________________

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

At Tuesday’s county commissioners’ meeting, anti-illegal immigration activist D.A. King called on the commissioners “to publicly vote on a resolution to reaffirm support of sheriff’s use of federal 287(g) program, and further, to express their support of the two officers who have been smeared by the parasitic hucksters at the SPLC and the open-border communists at the National Lawyers Guild, which is the main organization of the National Immigration Project.”

Marietta Daily Journal

Police lawsuit could cost county taxpayers

by Kim Isaza

newseditor@mdjonline.co m

August 27, 2010

MARIETTA – Although the county wasn’t named as a party to the federal civil-rights suit filed this week against two Cobb police officers, taxpayers are still likely to foot the bill – and it could be a hefty one. The county’s Internal Affairs department is also now investigating the incident.

On Monday, lawyers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala., filed suit on behalf of Angel Francisco Castro-Torres against Jeremiah Lignitz and Brian J. Walraven. The suit alleges that Lignitz and Walraven, who are both Cobb police officers, stopped Castro-Torres without cause on March 26 – violating his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure – beat him, arrested him and took him to Cobb County Jail, where he would end up in immigration custody.

In his report made at the time of the arrest, Walraven wrote that Castro-Torres was wearing gang attire, and that “the Hispanic male failed to yield and entered the crosswalk with his bicycle and almost struck our patrol car.” That report also notes that the man repeatedly refused to give his date of birth, tried to break away and attempted to grab Lignitz’s Taser.

Lignitz’s report notes: “I struck the male with my forearm in the face to make him release his grip on my Taser.”

While still in custody at the Cobb Jail on misdemeanor charges of obstruction, Castro-Torres underwent surgery at Northwest Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery on April 8 to repair his left eye socket and his nose. The Cobb’s Sheriff’s Office paid the $2,600 surgery bill, sheriff’s Col. Don Bartlett said.

The civil-rights suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia specifies that Lignitz and Walraven are being sued only “in their individual capacities,” and they are the only defendants named in the suit, which seeks unspecified damages.

“Violating an innocent man’s civil rights carries no price tag,” said Sam Brooke, one of the lawyers at the SPLC who filed the suit. “The 287(g) program does not work and needs to end. In the meantime, every member of law enforcement who operates within an area where these type of programs are in place need to know they can not violate someone’s civil rights.”

As of late Thursday, a check of the federal courts’ online filing system indicated the officers had not yet been served with the suit. They have 20 days from the day they are served to file a response.

After the suit was announced, Cobb Police Chief John Houser requested an Internal Affairs investigation of the officers and the arrest, county spokesman Robert Quigley said.

Lance LoRusso, a lawyer who represents the state Fraternal Order of Police as well as the local lodge in Cobb County, said the defense of such civil-rights cases is “extremely expensive.”

“Whether these officers are cleared, the way this was drafted was intended to create a financial burden on these officers to defend the case,” LoRusso said. “They’re trying to make these officers pay a tremendous amount of money. And if there’s a judgment against them, it likely would be paid by Cobb County, because they’re acting as employees.”

Any such judgment could also include the plaintiff’s legal bills, which LoRusso said could easily be at least $100,000.

Because the two officers were on duty at the time of the alleged incident, the county expects to provide lawyers for them, the county’s spokesman said.

“It is our intent in this case to provide legal representation to the officers,” spokesman Robert Quigley said.

Brooke, of the SPLC, said his group – and the other five lawyers representing Castro-Torres – are not seeking damages directly from the county or the police department.

“(Castro-Torres) is seeking to recover damages from these two individuals. On paper and what will be told to jury is that these two are the ones who any damage amount would come from,” Brooke said. “It’s these two officers who violated his Constitutional rights. They had the discretion, the opportunity to either pull him over without cause and assault him, or not. And it’s for that violation that they are being sued.”

Lignitz has been with Cobb Police just over three years, and Walraven has been an officer for nearly 10 years, a police spokesman said.

The advocacy group claims in the suit that the two officers stopped Castro-Torres about 4:30 p.m. on March 26, as he was riding a bicycle near the intersection of South Cobb Drive and Old Concord Road. He spoke little English, the suit notes, but the officers continued to question him about his immigration status and did not seek an interpreter.

“The defendants stopped and arrested Mr. Casto because of his Latino race and ethnicity, from which they inferred that he was a noncitizen,” the suit states.

The officers did not appear in Cobb State Court to testify in the obstruction case against Castro-Torres – even after Judge Toby Prodgers issued subpoenas for them to do so – and on Aug. 10 the case was dismissed, both the suit and State Court records indicate.

At Tuesday’s county commissioners’ meeting, anti-illegal immigration activist D.A. King called on the commissioners “to publicly vote on a resolution to reaffirm support of sheriff’s use of federal 287(g) program, and further, to express their support of the two officers who have been smeared by the parasitic hucksters at the SPLC and the open-border communists at the National Lawyers Guild, which is the main organization of the National Immigration Project.”

Read more: The Marietta Daily Journal – Police lawsuit could cost county taxpayers