BY THE NUMBERS

BY THE NUMBERS: U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s political committee has spent $40,000 to hire investigators to research for negative attacks that could surface against him as a potential GOP vice-presidential nominee... Following the release of a photo in which Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer stuck her finger in President Obama’s face on an airport tarmac in January, she has received 12,000 emails and letters... Eighty percent of murders in Mexico go unpunished and 96.4% of those in the state of Chihuahua don’t result in prison sentences.

POLITICAL PROFUNDITIES: Wobbly GOP presidential race tagalong Rick Santorum offers this zingless zinger to rightwing radio’s Glenn Beck: President Obama should never have allowed daughter Malia to go to Mexico with classmates on a spring community service project — an awful example after the U.S. State Department issued travel warnings to avoid certain areas of our friendly neighbor. (No warning was issued for Oaxaca, where Malia ventured.)

GREG’S JOKE: Greg Mankiw, the Harvard professor who serves as one of Mitt Romney’s top economic advisers, shared this budgetary projection from a reader of his popular economics blog the day GOP congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin released a budget Democrats condemned as a Medicare killer.

Under the header “A Fiscal Solution,” Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, posted a photo of a “newspaper clip” that read:

“Budget Cuts: The Immigration Department will start deporting seniors instead of illegals in order to lower Social Security and Medicare costs. Older people are easier to catch and less likely to remember how to get home.”

NOT SO FUNNY: Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee just conducted hearings on the Obama administration’s proposals to address the multiple atrocities being committed by staff members at U.S. deportation centers against female immigrants awaiting trips back to their countries of origin.

The GOP subcommittee titled the panel sessions involving Immigration & Customs Enforcement actions as “Holidays on ICE.” Members of the all-Democrat Congressional Hispanic Caucus failed to find humor in the title. Among reacters:

CHC Chair Charles González: “There have been multiple reports of atrocious abuses at immigrant detention facilities... Instead of addressing the problem, Republicans are attacking the Administration. As Americans, we should ensure that everyone in federal custody is treated with dignity and respect.

Rep. Luis González: “It’s no joke. Republicans are playing with people’s lives like it’s a sport,...scoring cheap political points.”

MISSING PARTS: Although I’ve yet to respond to its pleas for contributions, I fairly regularly check truthout’s daily messages on my computer screen, and — kaboom! — its news story teaser a week ago was hard to ignore:

“A Pair of Testicles Fell Off the President After Election Day.”

(There are several coloquial ways to share that comment in Spanish, but I’ll leave the translation to Frank Gómez and his contacts at Real Academia Española.)

My instant reaction was the quote’s source was going to reveal something about immigration reform and unkept promises.

I was wrong. The line was attributed to a former Guantanamo chief prosecutor. So to make certain I was still functioning okay, I clicked forward to the obituary page. There I found two familiar names with personal histories that had their Hispanic moments.

DEAD EAVESDROPPERS? No hay que hablar mal de los muertos. Never speak ill of the dead. My mother’s occasional admonitions didn’t make any sense to me as a child. I was savvy enough to know that dead people couldn’t eavesdrop on my conversations. But I pretty much paid heed to my mother’s words.

My dilemma now is how to acknowledge the recent passings of Andy Rooney and Matthew Martínez.

My recollection about Rooney, who hung on till age 88, is that he offended a lot of people with his frequently witless wit. Andy was a smirking boor. (Sorry, Mamá.) His targets one particular day were Latin American baseball players. Andy dismissed their incredible contributions to the game with the comment, “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodríguez...They haven’t caught my interest.”

What can I say about Marty Martínez?

After nine terms in Congress in a heavily Hispanic district, he lost badly in the primary.That’s almost impossible to do. Hispanic Link editor Charlie Ericksen remembers having a normal relationship with Martínez until the Link surveyed Congress and reported that Martínez had just two Hispanics on his large staff, far fewer than any other rep in a Hispanic district.. After that,Marty interrupted a couple of news conferences when Ericksen asked a question, to volunteer,almost comically, that the Link just wrote a bunch of lies.

When Ericksen’s son Héctor, who takes after his Zapotec mother in height and complexion, first joined the Link staff, as is custom, he introduced himself by name at a news conference, Martínez jumped up to challenge him with “You are NOT! I know Ericksen!”

With an innocent smile, Héctor responded to the congressman with a question, “What am I going to tell my mother?”

MISSING PARTS: Although I’ve yet to respond to its pleas for contributions, I fairly regularly check truthout’s daily messages on my computer screen, and — kaboom! — its news story teaser a week ago was hard to ignore:

“A Pair of Testicles Fell Off the President After Election Day.”

(There are several coloquial ways to share that comment in Spanish, but I’ll leave the translation to Frank Gómez and his contacts at Real Academia Española.)

My instant reaction was the quote’s source was going to reveal something about immigration reform and unkept promises.

I was wrong. The line was attributed to a former Guantanamo chief prosecutor. So to make certain I was still functioning okay, I clicked forward to the obituary page. There I found two familiar names with personal histories that had their Hispanic moments.

DEAD EAVESDROPPERS? No hay que hablar mal de los muertos. Never speak ill of the dead. My mother’s occasional admonitions didn’t make any sense to me as a child. I was savvy enough to know that dead people couldn’t eavesdrop on my conversations. But I pretty much paid heed to my mother’s words.

My dilemma now is how to acknowledge the recent passings of Andy Rooney and Matthew Martínez.

My recollection about Rooney, who hung on till age 88, is that he offended a lot of people with his frequently witless wit. Andy was a smirking boor. (Sorry, Mamá.) His targets one particular day were Latin American baseball players. Andy dismissed their incredible contributions to the game with the comment, “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys

named Rodríguez...They haven’t caught my interest.”

What can I say about Marty Martínez?

After nine terms in Congress in a heavily Hispanic district, he lost badly in the primary.That’s almost impossible to do. Hispanic Link editor Charlie Ericksen remembers having a normal relationship with Martínez until the Link surveyed Congress and reported that Martínez had just two Hispanics on his large staff, far fewer than any other rep in a Hispanic district.. After that,Marty interrupted a couple of news conferences when Ericksen asked a question, to volunteer,almost comically, that the Link just wrote a bunch of lies.

When Ericksen’s son Héctor, who takes after his Zapotec mother in height and complexion, first joined the Link staff, as is custom, he introduced himself by name at a news conference, Martínez jumped up to challenge him with “You are NOT! I know Ericksen!”

With an innocent smile, Héctor responded to the congressman with a question, “What am I going to tell my mother?”

‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT GUILTY OF KILLING NUN’

On Nov. 1, the tabloid Washington Examiner splashed this across the top half of its Page 1:

‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT GUILTY OF KILLING NUN’

(Hispanic Link publisher Charlie Ericksen takes over from here.)

The editors who composed or approved those provocative words should turn in their press credentials and join the KKK, the Federation for American Immigration Reform or some other publicly identified hate group. The racist composite the Examiner created tells its readers to fear and hate 11 million U.S. immigrants.

The “illegal alien nun-killer” the headline paints is Carlos Martinelly-Montaño. It’s untrue. He is not here illegally. In January 2009, he was granted a Employment Authorization Document (EAD), a temporary work permit issued by Homeland Security. Then he secured an identification card from the state of Virginia. His successful pursuit of a job was vetted by the e-verify process.

His parents brought Carlos undocumented to the United States from Bolivia when he was eight years old. He grew up in suburban northern Virginia and is the father of two small U.S. born children. His parents are now legal residents and he applied for legal residency four years ago. As a teenager, Carlos was twice arrested for misdemeanor driving under the influence. He enrolled in and completed a program to deal with his serious alcoholism problem. Then last year, at 22, he drove his Subaru into a highway guardrail while drunk and crashed head-on into a car occupied by three nuns. One of them, Sister Denise Mosier, 66, was killed. The Examiner chose to write a headline conjuring up a lusting, machete-wielding psycho chasing nuns through our tranquil communities, making readers’ flesh creep.

Carlos was charged with, and found guilty of, murder. This is the first time that a DUI case involving a fatality resulted in a murder conviction in Virginia. He faces up to 70 years in prison.

The Examiner isn’t alone with Its front-loaded “illegal immigrant” headline. On top of the list of news outlets that have routinely depicted Martinelly-Montaño a criminal alien who just sneaked across our border are CBS News, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, National Public Radio — the list goes on.

While Carlos’ punishment far exceeds the norm, even weighing the tragedy consequences of his act, this is not a plea for mercy.

The Benedictine sisters, along with Carlos’ family, already have done that. The Benedictine sisters also expressed dismay that this case has become politicized as a forum for debate on illegal immigration.

As a journalist, I’ll feel better if media like the Examiner would stop fanning flames of hate and ethnic division and concentrate on journalistic ethics and telling the whole truth.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING? Transparency in government has been bobbing around in the nation’s capital, in statehouses and in city halls for some time now as a political virtue. I’ve been for it all along. Our leaders should explain in detail how and why they spend taxpayer dollars.

But the case of Sunland Park, New Mexico, mayor and congressional candidate Martín Reséndiz gives me pause. As mayor, he’s being sued for payment on a $1 million contract he signed with a California architectural design firm.

The contract should be voided, Reséndiz explains in a deposition presented to the court. It contends he was drunk when he signed it. “I had way too much to drink and I didn’t know what I was signing,” he says. Legally, that’s a defense that can stand up.

If, for some unsurprising reason, his deposition flowers into a congressional campaign issue, apparently Reséndiz has his sister lined up as a character witness.

One of my sources, the Albuquerque Journal, didn’t state specifically whether the mayor was, as the saying goes. ”a fallingdown drunk,” but it did include his recollection, “My sister had to pick me up.” Am I misreading that last line?

SPIDER-MAN CHANGES COLOR: The word is out. RIP Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, the Marvel comic-book hero who first appeared in 1962, is about to be killed by the Green Goblin.

Bienvenido, Miles Morales. The “fresh and new and vital” (and demographically in sync) replacement set to emerge as the webspinning crime-fighter’s modern incarnation is Morales. He will be introduced as “a half-black, half-Hispanic American teenager.”

CÉSAR’S FISHY BOAT: With the gridlocked Republican and Democratic parties here in the capital doing nothing but calling each other names these days, it’s nice that progressive Latino voices and regressive conservative nutcakes can agree on something.

They both want to scuttle the USNS César Chávez, a Navy cargo ship which was christened in San Diego on May 18.

Pedro Ríos, the American Friends Service Committee’s sentry on the U.S.-Mexico border, details his personal and professional reasons for opposing the act.

He asks whether an instrument of war is appropriate to honor a man dedicated to non-violence and peace.

In a press release, right-wing California congressman Duncan Hunter frames his objection more deviously. Obviously upset because the name “César Chávez,” who took on Hunter’s millionaire agribusiness buddies until the day of his untimely death, should be associated with anything patriotic, he craftily proposes replacing it with the name of Sgt. Rafael Peralta, a Navy Cross winner from his San Diego district.

After years of opposing just about everything that would level the playing field for Hispanic families, Duncan chose the deceased Latino war hero to pit against one of our greatest icons, a man who devoted his life to making conditions that farm laborers suffered for decades more bearable (realities that in too many instances campesinos still are forced to endure).

Most media didn’t question Duncan’s motive, but that doesn’t change the color of his stripes.

Fellow radical right mouthpiece Maggie Thornton posts this comment in her online column The Lonely Conservative:

“Cesar Chavez, the Marxist community organizer and farm union leader, who hated the U.S. Navy and capitalism, has been honored with a Lewis and Clark class Naval vessel named the Cesar Chavez. The Lewis and Clark class ships are named after American “pioneers.” You’ll remember the outcry when another ship in the same class was named for the traitorous Congressman John Murtha, who did his best to ruin the Marines.”

La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz 

‘PENDEJO’ TROPHY — House Speaker John Boehner’s gaffe this past week — canceling CInco de Mayo — received barely a ripple of attention in the daily white press, even here in politics-loco Washington. But those of us who learned Mexican history from Anheuser- Busch, Coors and Corona are placing it in our Political Pendejo trophy 

case next to Newt Gingrich’s “Hablador de la Casa” message to La Raza a few years back.

“The elephant-guys have fired another shot into their already riddled left foot,” Link columnist Andy Porras quotes a popular Latino radio personality in Northern California.

It’s true that in Mexico, El Cinco runs a distant second, to El Dieciséis de Septiembre as a major day of celebration. But among Mexican- American families in the Southwest and other Latinos and beer drinkers countrywide it leaves El Dieciséis in its polvo.

Springtime is picnic time.

It’s true that not all of us know exactly what happened or where as the cause for celebration.Years ago, when this publication was in knee-pants, Mexican-American members of Congress decided to educate their non-Hispanic colleagues as to how indigenous Mexican farmers defeated a well-trained, handsomely uniformed French army in the 1862 Battle of Puebla.

So a pair of our elected representatives composed a stirring account describing Mexico’s epic victory, They entered it into the Congressional Record.

Their only problem was they didn’t spell too well.

They reported that the historic event occurred in Pueblo, which is the home of the state of Colorado’s largest chili festival, not Puebla, where the farmers’ heroics occurred in Central Mexico.

Let me share a final Cinco de Mayo scrapbook entry with you — one for the road.¡Salud!

Ready to be enshrined also among artifacts in our Cinco trophy case is a conversation overheard by Hispanic Link publisher Charlie Ericksen. Two California legislators were conversing as they exited the state Capitol building in Sacramento.

The tall one asked the short one, “By the way, when is Cinco de Mayo?”

(Read former Weekly Report editor Erick Galindo’s commentary on Boehner’s “trangression.”)