The soft bigotry of shoddy news releases

Faced with a candidate whose hard line on immigration is going to cause him to have a hard time reaching out to Hispanics, Kris Kobach's Republican allies are doing what they do best: lashing out with lies and distortions.

In a news release, the National Republican Campaign Committee accuses Congressman Dennis Moore of "soft bigotry" when it comes to Hispanics.

Of course, the NRCC is engaging in its own bigotry when it thinks the Hispanic media is more likely to print its shoddy attacks if they quote Dos Mundos and have it signed by NRCC spokesperson Alejandro Burgos, as opposed to regular spokesperson Carl Forti.

The release shows how desperate Republicans are on the economy. Take this quote from Moore in their two-paragraph "section" entitled "Economy and Jobs": “Congress should adopt a balanced budget. Three years ago we provided tax cuts when we had a surplus. Now we have a deficit and we need to be careful with tax cuts."

The NRCC's entire response? "The Facts: Moore voted against a budget proposal to reduce the deficit and cut taxes. "

First off, for there to be "facts," you need to have more than one fact. But secondly, when did voting against a tax cut in a time of record deficits not count as a vote to reduce the deficit? (This "fact" also ignores the reality that budget resolutions are non-binding.)

The other "facts" are equally non-existent.

The NRCC makes the thoroughly discredited claim that Kansas has "unspent" education funding.

Also on education, in response to Moore's statement that a child in a class of 25 who is not proficient with English needs six to seven years to be able to function equally with the others in the class -- a commentary on the need for smaller classes -- Burgos says six to seven years is "ludicrous," but can only offer up a reference to uncited "research" that says it takes just a year.

Moore's statement can also be backed up by research, except this is real research that we actually quote*, rather than the NRCC's imaginary "research."

And finally, when attacking Moore on health care, the NRCC trots out its old sham of medical malpractice reform, along with a bill that the National Association of Health Underwriters says would actually increase health insurance costs.

But of course, facts are secondary when you want to go on the attack...and we expect to see plenty of attacks from Kobach and his helpers this year.



* From "How Long Does It Take English Learners to Attain Proficiency?" by
The University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute:

"The clear conclusion emerging from these data sets is that even in two California districts that are considered the most successful in teaching English to LEP students, oral proficiency takes 3 to 5 years to develop, and academic English proficiency can take 4 to 7 years."

Four to seven years in the best ESL districts -- not a district which, due to unfunded federal mandates, has 25+ kids per classroom.


From Myths and Misconceptions about Second Language Learning by Barry McLaughlin, University of California, Santa Cruz:

"Often, teachers assume that once children can converse comfortably in English, they are in full control of the language. Yet for school-aged children, there is much more involved in learning a second language than learning how to speak it. A child who is proficient in face-to-face communication has not necessarily achieved proficiency in the more abstract and disembedded academic language needed to engage in many classroom activities, especially in the later grades. For example, the child needs to learn what nouns and verbs are and what synonyms and antonyms are. Such activities require the child to separate language from the context of actual experience and to learn to deal with abstract meanings. "

"A great deal of research has been done on the differences between embedded and disembedded language, and the consensus is that the distinction is a real one, although we are dealing with a continuum of linguistic skills rather than with a dichotomy (Snow, 1987; Wong Fillmore, 1982). The Canadian educator, Jim Cummins (1980a), cited research evidence from a study of 1,210 immigrant children in Canada indicating that it takes these children much longer (approximately five to seven years) to master the disembedded cognitive language skills required for the regular English curriculum than to master oral communicative skills. Cummins and others speak of the "linguistic facade, "whereby children appear to be fluent in a language because of their oral skills but have not mastered the more disembedded and decontextualized aspects of the language. "