It’s exciting to see the outpouring of support for human rights in light of Arizona’s sweeping new immigration law.

The protests are spilling now over into baseball. New York City Congressman Jose Serrano is calling for Major League Baseball to pull the 2011 All-Star game out of Phoenix.

“Baseball and the Latin community, it’s a close relationship,” Serrano told the Chicago Tribune. “Latinos, they will be the ones, more than anyone else, who will be stopped on the street in violation of the constitutional rights. . . . States (that) make those decisions need to know that there are consequences to those decision.”

Arizona has felt the economic consequences before. The National Football League pulled the 1993 Superbowl from Tempe due to the MLK holiday flap. A baseball spokeman estimated that pulling the All-Star game could cost Arizona $40 million.

Serrano told the Trib that he may reach out to club owners and even ask players to boycott the All-Star game. Considering that 27 percent of the baseball players on Opening Day rosters were born outside the United States, this boycott isn’t just symbolic.

The Arizona Diamondbacks rolled into Chicago to play the Cubs, and the team was met with protesters. (The Diamondback’s owner, Ken Kendrick, is a major financial backer of the Republican Party in Arizona.)

Who knows, maybe boycotting the Arizona Diamondbacks could be something that brings Cubs fans and White Sox fans together. White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen was blunt in his criticism of the new law.

“That’s no respect of human rights,” he said. “Being illegal in any country, that’s not good, period. But the immigration (service) has to be careful about how they treat people.”

“I want to see one day with Latin Americans—it can be Mexican, Costa Rican—I want to see this country two days without them to see how good we’re doing. Everyone comes to this country to work, and I don’t think they’re going to do bad stuff here. They just come here to make things happen, to make a better life. I guarantee you whoever comes to this country and they don’t have their papers, they’re straight and narrow. They’re scared to be deported.”

Guillen, who was born in Venezuela, didn’t become a U.S. citizen until after he won the World Series.

President Obama is a White Sox fan and I can only hope he’s listening to what Guillen has to say.

It’s hard to imagine that 40 years ago, 20 million people, or 10% of the U.S. population, participated in Earth Day.

Earth Day was the brainchild of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson.

On April 20 and 21, the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies held a conference entitled “Earth Day at Forty: Valuing Wisconsin’s Environmental Traditions, Past, Present and Future.”

The conference was terrific and included a number of fantastic speakers, including author Margaret Atwood and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Atwood talked about the need for power to be decentralized, and proposed a new principle for the environmental justice movement: Eco-Mercy. Rather than haggling over injustice, let’s focus on compassion.

Kennedy acted as the provocateur, saying “the best thing for the environment is free market capitalism.” He said what we have now is “corporate crony capitalism.” It’s time to end all the subsidies—hidden and obvious ones—of the carbon-based economy. De-carbonization will lead to prosperity, he said.

Tia Nelson, the Senator’s daughter, spoke tenderly about her “Papa” and how he never would’ve imagined that his legacy would be forty years of environmental activism.

Senator Nelson wrote about the degradation of our planet in the pages of The Progressive. In 1967, he wrote a piece for us entitled, “The National Pollution Scandal.”

“The natural environment of America—the woods and waters and wildlife, the clear air and blue sky, the fertile soil and the scenic landscape—is threatened with destruction,” Senator Nelson wrote. He outlined “this new American tragedy,” and noted, “It must be attacked for what it is: a sinister byproduct of the prosperous, urbanized, industrialized world in which we live.”

In November 1969, he wrote a piece for The Progressive called, “Our Polluted Planet.”

“I am convinced that all that is needed now is the trigger to activate the overwhelming insistence of the new generation on environmental quality,” he predicted. “It is the young who can begin to stem the tide of disaster. To marshal such an effort, I am proposing a National Teach-In on the Crisis of the Environment to be held next spring on every university campus across the nation. The crisis is so imminent, in my opinion, that every university should set aside one day in the school year—the same day across the nation—for the Teach-In.”

Tia Nelson spoke about Gaylord’s numerous attempts to get Congress and Presidents to take seriously the destruction of our landscapes. The original Earth Day would not have happened without the Senator’s willingness to fail over and over again. Earth Day, she said, spoke to the power of an individual to make change.

But individual acts are not enough. As Kennedy noted, where there’s environmental destruction, there’s also a destruction of democracy. Elected officials need to be visionaries like Gaylord Nelson, and create policies that will end pollution-based prosperity.

Today when I was at the Tea Party rally, I couldn’t believe hearing Rage Against the Machine playing as filler. Huh? The most popular anti-capitalist band, known all over the world, whose music was practically banned from the radio after 9/11, somehow fits in with this crowd?

What were they thinking?

This may have been a better fit.

The Tea Partiers held a Tax Day demo at the Wisconsin state capital today. The local organizers said the crowd totaled 12,000. Seemed like a stretch. Much closer to 3000.

Tommy Thompson took the stage late in the rally. His face was as red as his tie. He was so fired up, I was worried he’d have a heart attack and we would see “ObamaCare” in action.

Rumors have been flying about the possibility of Tommy running against Russ Feingold this year. Much to the dismay of the people who chanted “Run, Tommy, Run,” he has decided not to. Like just about everyone else who spoke, he had a very pro-God ending.

I did speak to Terrence Wall, a local Madison developer, who is running against Feingold. He criticized Feingold, saying he’s been in office since 1982 and is now a career politician. “He hasn’t accomplished anything,” said Wall.

Wall said that his top priority is to get jobs started and rebuild confidence in the state, and “get government out of the way.”

I asked him, given what he said about the government being in the way, where he came down on civil liberties. Would he have voted for the Patriot Act? (Feingold was the only Senator to vote against it.)

Wall said he would have voted for the Patriot Act. It’s about “striking a balance” between security and rights. “I’m for civil liberties,” he said. “And they’re going after terrorists; they aren’t going after you and me.”

Well what about the No Fly Lists? “I had a friend who was on one of the those by mistake.”

Wall should be an easy target for Dems. Wall says he’s against taxes, and oh, is he ever. According to the Capital Times, “Wall has not paid personal state income taxes in nine of the past 10 years, according to the state Department of Revenue. That’s quite remarkable, as Wall is a son of privilege who has always enjoyed great wealth and whose real estate empire has, according to his own campaign spokesman, incurred tens of millions of dollars in tax obligations over the past five years.”

The Capital Times continues: “Let’s consider Feingold’s record. According to Department of Revenue figures, the senator paid net taxes between $6,000 and $9,400 each year from 1999 to 2008. So how come Russ Feingold pays more net taxes than Terrence Wall? That’s easy. Feingold’s one of the great mass of Americans who work hard, pay their taxes and try to abide by the rules. Wall’s one of the elite few who think that their money and position give them the privilege to write a special set of rules for themselves. Feingold thinks everyone should pay their fair share. Wall thinks that working Americans should pay their fair share — and his.”

Top Ten Signs at the Mad Tea Party:

“One Nation Under God, not Obama”
“Your dog has birth papers Do You Mr. President”
“First they ignore you . . . Then they laugh at you . . .then they try to fight you . . . then you win. –Gandhi”
“Cap your income and Trade your freedom”
“Chris Matthews needs a diaper change”
“Teach a man to fish and you lose a Democrat voter”
“On the eighth day, God created capitalism”
“Free markets not Free loaders”
“I will not grab my ankles”
“Social Justice sucks if you work hard”

There were some non-Tea Party people around too. A group of young women with glasses and short hair had signs that read “Giving tea a bad name.”

But the most ironic moment was hearing the organizers blaring Rage Against the Machine. Huh?

During Obama’s first year in office, the number of people deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased to 388,000, the most in U.S. history. Why?

One main reason is that the Obama Administration has maintained an emphasis on enforcement programs. And like its predecessors, the Obama Administration says it’s going after the serious criminal offenders.

But the very programs it’s pushing are not catching major criminals.

Exhibit A: the 287(g) program.

The 287(g) program, which deputizes local police officers to enforce federal immigration law, grew dramatically during the Bush Administration. The program was part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which President Clinton signed in 1996. Tough enforcement policies were seen as a way to get Republican support for the 1996 immigration bill. That law also made almost any conviction, even for minor infractions, a deportable offense.

The Department of Homeland Security touts the success of this federal-local partnership between law enforcement agencies. However, a report by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security released last week tells a different story.

The report raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the 287(g) program. The report says that the
program is poorly managed and supervised by ICE. The 287(g) program lacks clear guidelines, so it’s being carried out differently in various places. The program isn’t developing data to track itself. And ICE is not going after local police agencies that clearly violate the agreement.

One thing that the 287(g) program is doing well is turning people into ICE, regardless of whether or not they are criminals.

“ICE’s primary performance measure for the 287(g) program is the number of aliens encountered by 287(g) officers,” the inspector general report states. “However, with performance measures that do not focus on aliens who pose a threat to public safety or are a danger to the community, there is a reduced assurance that the goal of the 287(g) program is being met.”

Furthermore, this report goes on to say that results do not show that “287(g) resources have been focused on aliens who pose the greatest risk to the public.”

Hopefully, Secretary Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security will give this new report a hard look, and end this costly program that doesn’t work.