Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times offers "Latino and black voters reassessing ties to GOP". As with another article he wrote, it contains conventional "wisdom" in support of illegal immigration. While he's to be commended for bringing George Bush's Aztlan video to our attention, the non-corrupt wing of the GOP might want to consider whether his advice is in their best interest.

The Latino backlash has grown so intense that one prominent, typically pro-Republican organization, the Latino Coalition, has endorsed Democrats in competitive races this year in Tennessee, Nebraska and New Jersey. The coalition is chaired by Hector Barreto, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration under Bush; its president is a former strategist for the Republican National Committee...

But in recent months, Democratic activists watched with amazement as Republicans pushed into law a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border and tried to make it a felony to migrate illegally or to help undocumented immigrants. The latter provision did not become law, but it especially angered some church leaders, who said it would have criminalized their religious duty to help the least privileged in society.

Despite Bush's lobbying for an immigrant guest-worker program, favored by many Latinos, conservative lawmakers in the House refused to bend, forcing Bush to endorse the fence legislation and dimming his popularity among Latinos...

Needless to say, Wallsten takes at a given that the problem is with those House Republicans and not with Bush or those "many Latinos". Perhaps those Latinos who don't support our immigration laws out of racial power grounds or similar should be considered the outliers, and not those elected U.S. representatives who want to enforce our laws. And, his statement that HR4437 would make it a felony to "help undocumented immigrants" is false. Rather than calling those far-left "religious leaders" on their lies, Wallsten repeats them.

The article also contains this misleading statement:

Bush won an estimated 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. While polling numbers vary, many analysts said that represented about a 9-percentage-point improvement from 2000, suggesting that Latinos might become a substantial pillar upholding a durable Republican majority.