Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo boycotted the Univision debate earlier this week because “the very idea of having the forum in Spanish was un-American” and those who participated were simply “pandering” to Hispanic voters. Interviewed by Rick Sanchez on CNN last night, Tancredo said citizenship in America requires English fluency.
“You know, if you are going to vote in this country, you should be a citizen,” Tancredo said. “That’s the law. Some people vote if they’re not. But to be a citizen of this country, you’re supposed to be able to know English. We should not be separating America into these linguistic camps and eventually it becomes ethnic, it’s terrible.”
- Mostly True, Barely True, False. The presidential candidates spew a lot of fact and fiction on the campaign trail. But accessing the accuracy of their statements just got a whole lot easier with Politifact — a Web site maintained by the St. Petersburg Times that rates and explains the statements and accusations they make from false to true and varying degrees in between. According to the site, Barack Obama’s candidacy is 15 years in the making, as Hillary Clinton’s camp released in a statement last week to paint Obama as ambitious and competitive. Rudy Giuliani, for his part, was welcoming to immigrants during his tenure as Mayor of New York City, one of many of his old stances he’s distancing himself from now.
- Shooting the Messenger. A young Washington Post reporter has taken a lot of heat recently over a story he wrote on Barack Obama’s rumoured connections to Islam. A wave of stories surfaced on Romanesko, including one by a Boston University journalism professor who says journalists under 30 have no business writing A1 political stories for national papers. Ouch. But others have come to the repoter’s defense, including New York Times Washington reporter, Adam Nagourney, who writes that Perry Bacon, Jr. identified an important issue and shouldn’t apologize for his age.
