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.”)

UTAH’S ‘CONTRACT’: If you’ve read Page 1, you know what progressive author David Bacon and farm labor groups think of Utah’s new immigration “contract” law. They hate it.

Now, the ultra-reactionary Federation for American Immigration Reform has announced its position. It hates it, too. (That’s the “FAIR” organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has catalogued as an anti-immigrant hate group.)

The “contract” is what Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed into law March 15 — a series of four immigration bills.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has been lobbying the U.S. Department of Justice and White House to implement its main “guest worker” provision, HB116, nationally.

Here, in FAIR’s own precious words, are a few of its 15 reasons why it is informing its faithful they must oppose the Utah “contract”:

1. By creating a guest worker program for illegal aliens, HB 116 encourages more illegal immigration and further encourages those illegal aliens to settle in Utah.

2. There is no limit to the number of illegal aliens guest workers businesses may employ.

3. There is no requirement that employers... search for U.S. workers before hiring illegal alien guest workers.

4. There is no requirement that employers...pay those workers the same wage they pay U.S. workers.

5. Big business will hire guest workers at low wages, but bear none of the responsibility for health care for their workers. Taxpayers will be burdened with the health care costs.

7. Illegal alien guest workers can bring in their spouses and minor children under “immediate family permits.”

8. Gang members not barred from participation.

9. Illegal aliens would have access to Utah’s administrative courts.

11. It only requires aliens’ “best efforts” to learn English. There you have it. Peas in a pod. Who says we can’t get along?

Hollywood produced “Becky Sharp,” its first full-length motion picture in color, in 1935. But the Eastern press still hasn’t accepted the reality that the United States isn’t just black-and-white.

The Census Bureau broke the news at the National Press Club March 24 in a room jam-packed with journalists and TV cameras. It announced, with its 2010 tally now in, the U.S. Hispanic population zoomed past the 50-million population mark.

Sharing the day’s ethnic/racial news highlights, The New York Times ran as its No. 2 online headline (behind, of course, another Gaddafi/Libya cliffhanger) ‘Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend.’

As expected, The Washington Post found a spot on page 17 for the Hispanic milestone. It reported in its lead paragraph the unavoidable fact that “young Hispanics and Asians” drove the nation’s population increase,” concluding the lead sentence with “an aging white population was essentially stagnant.” Then it continued, “(T)he statistics underscore the country’s rush toward a day, barely three decades from now, when non-Hispanic whites will be a minority.”

Lo, the poor paleface.

For a quarter of a page, the Post story quoted experts who were anything but Hispanic on the changing demographics. Finally, in its last two sentences, it let Arturo Vargas, executive director of National Association of Hispanic Elected and Appointed Officials, squeeze in that Latinos already comprise nearly one in four of the country’s school-age children and unless we do a better job of educating them today, “we’re putting at risk this country’s economic success tomorrow.”

Eastern media’s denial of the existence of Mexican Americans, who make up about two-thirds of the country’s 50 million Hispanics, is legendary in the Southwest. So is the federal government’s lack of interest in hiring them as part of its 2.7 million civil service workforce. Now 16.3% of the U.S. population, Hispanics comprise only 7.5% of those holding such jobs with Uncle Sam.

THE FAT PLAGUE: Print this column and attach it to your refrigerator door while you reach in for that leftover slice of strawberry cheesecake or a second helping of Ben & Jerry’s chunky monkey ice cream, topped with a maraschino cherry.

It’s okay.

Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar has found that there’s a virus, ad-36, that causes obesity. Accept his revolutionary theory and your feelings of glutton-guilt will shrivel as your waistline does likewise.

Hispanic Link’s lead syndicated columnist José de la Isla encountered Doctor D the other day while indulging in cajeta in Mexico City. He had surfed into a BBC site where he was confronted with the question, “Have you seen Channel 4’s Fat Plague?”

He hadn’t. But he was certainly aware that we Hispanics are disproportionately susceptible to obesity and diabetes.

Dr Dhurandhar first formed his ideas in India where his father started an obesity clinic in the 1960s, José learned. Daddy D pioneering the obesity study and his son Nikhil is carrying on his work.

“Dhurandhar says he has tested ad-36 on a small number of obese Americans, and found that 30% of them have antibodies for ad-36, which would suggest that at some time or other all have been infected by what he calls the fat plague virus.

“Despite the impressive amount of data he has acquired, the scientific community remains deeply skeptical,” José was informed by the BBC blog. “The program screens both overweight and thin volunteers to assess whether they carry antibodies to the virus and whether it might have spread to the UK.”

In forwarding the report along to Sin Pelos, de la Isla added no cautionary note or endorsement of his own, other than to mention that a couple of decades back, ulcers were a major national worry, and the only accepted way to prevent them was to stop worrying.

Then medical science came up with an antibiotic or bandage or something, and ulcers are no longer viewed as a national plague.

If Dr. Dhurandhar does come up with a pill or elixir that can attack the fat virus, let us pray that he doesn’t share his discovery with that jolly fellow who visits us on Dec. 25. What child would want to perch on the boney knee of an anorexic St. Nick?

I’ll say it and then shut up.

Journalist Rubén Salazar had no pretensions about being a Latino leader. Or even of becoming the Mexican-American on commemorative 42-cent U.S. postage stamp for leading his tribe out of the Western desert. (He got one on April 22, 2008.)

That’s how at least a few brown college kids who majored in Chicano Studies extol him every August 29th, the date in 1970 he was killed by a cop.

His blonde late wife Sally used to say that RUben — not ruBEN (she put the accent on the first syllable of his name) was a steak-and-Scotch person, not a taco-and-tequila connoisseur, as do those of us who toast him with cold Coronas, con limón.

She would quote her children, all of whom were under 10 at the time he was killed at age 42, as inquiring if he really was that person being lionized as schools and streets were being named after him. They knew him as the dad they splashed with in their backyard swimming pool in Orange County.

Associates who knew him best recognized him as both persons. Culturally, he was raised in a hyphenated world, Mexican and American.

But don’t mislabel him as a “Mexican-American journalist.” He was a journalist — period. With his depth of understanding of people in our polyglot world, he stood out as a foreign correspondent in a profession overstaffed with Ivy Leaguers who parachute into Latin America and the simmering Middle East wearing trenchcoats and blinkers and pose as global experts. Rubén was the real thing. Vietnam was another beat on his resumé.

He integrated the near-lily-white Los Angeles Times news staff in 1959 after demonstrating his multiple reporting talents at the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post, Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat and San Francisco News.

Arriving in Southern California, he accepted no activists’ claims that the police were habitually discriminatory and brutal in their treatment of Latinos until he himself witnessed the pattern.

That’s when he started reporting on the realities of living and dying in L.A.’s barrios — a journalistic journey that ultimately led to his untimely death.

Like all publications worth their ink, Hispanic Link Weekly Report created its own stylebook years ago. For new staffers, it answers such questions as:

Is George López Hispanic or Hispano or Latino? Or maybe just a lower-case latino?

Was George Washington white or White? Was he an Anglo?

Can a mejicano or a peruano be an American?

Is Los Angeles a majority minority or minority majority city? Or neither one?

Are aliens just from Outer Space? Or do some come from Tijuana?

All the answers have been recorded in our Link stylebook, which over the years has had countless revisions.

Our dilemma now is nobody can find our stylebook. We must rely on our memories. And in the case of Charlie Ericksen, our patriarch publisher, that’s not a good idea. He’s forgets a lot.

But he has his good days. Like last week, a new columnist emailed whether we capitalize races. Charlie fired right back:

“We go lower case on black and white and use Afro-American or black pretty much interchangeably, guided by the author’s preference. If the term is in a direct quote, we go with what the speaker used, of course. We don’t use ‘minorities’ to mean blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc.”

Ericksen then shares his scorn over the way major dailies refer to Los Angeles as a “majority minority” city and brands anyone who calls a Hispanic a “minority” as guilty of a word-felony.

“It’s demeaning,” he says. “We are not less than.”

He rambles forward: “Interestingly, the media and many scholars have gone full circle on use of ‘color’. Years ago, out went ‘colored people’. Now ‘people of color’ are/is in. And in spite of the accepted term ‘La Raza’, Hispanics can be of any ‘race’. Someday, the Census Bureau may discard that passé classifier.

“Our first featured columnist and my dear late friend, José Antonio Burciaga, always used ‘Indo-Hispanic’. It’s certainly more precise for most inhabitants of the ‘American’ hemispheres.

“Hispanic Link doesn’t use ‘Americans’ to mean U.S. residents solely. What are Central and South Americans? Chopped iguana? We are Unitedstatesians, but that doesn’t ring right to me.

“In our lost stylebook, undocumented immigrants aren’t ‘illegal aliens’, no matter how AP defines them. Humans can’t be illegal. The only illegal aliens I ever met came from Mars.

Ericksen concludes, “I feel better already, getting this out of my system, just as I do after belching (to clean up a simile).”

POLITICS AT ITS UGLIEST

POLITICS AT ITS UGLIEST: We delayed this edition a couple of days just so we could include the results of the Senate vote on the DREAM Act.

Now we know.

Sixty votes were needed for its passage. Only 55 could be found and of those, only three were Republicans.

Justice, decency, fairness, compassion, patriotism and common sense all lost. Merit, of course, had nothing to do with the outcome. So what did? Who did?

As did many fine liberal politicians, Senator Robert Menéndez of New Jersey found the culprits quickly. “Core values of compassion and common sense have fallen prey to the shameful cowardice of wedge politics. This is a vote that will not soon be forgotten by a community that is growing not just in size but also in power and political awareness.”

Shortly after voting to break the filibuster against legislation repealing the policy against openly gay and lesbian persons serving in the military, the United States Senate failed to break the Republican-led filibuster blocking consideration of a revised and watered-down DREAM Act to give undocumented youth a shot atcollege and military service.

Bigotry is bipartisan.

It feeds on the passions of the moment.

It is instructive to recall that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy originated with a Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton and that the DREAM Act was originally introduced by a Republican senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah, in 2001.

It’s also important to remember that President Obama’s Chief of Staff successfully squelched members of his party from pursuing immigration reform early in his boss’s term on the grounds that “immigration is the third rail of American politics” — and that now running to become mayor of Chicago, Rham Emanuel is scrounging for the votes of immigrants who are naturalized citizens.

Some political commentators have speculated that the Dream Act may actually fare better when the new Congress is sworn in next year. There were many original Republican proponents of the Dream Act who simply didn’t want President Obama to get credit for its passage.

For sure, politicians in both parties have played Latinos like pawns in a Machiavellian chess game and incited racial and ethnic hatred when it served their selfish, personal interests.

If there is any other lesson in today’s tawdry Senate tallies, it probably is that any family can have a gay or lesbian member, but far fewer include an undocumented youth.

Thanks to demography and the universal nature of love, that too will change over the next couple generations.