Tuesday afternoon brought an interesting e-mail from Carol Dingman, a former city council member in Farmers Branch, Texas.

Farmers Branch, you may recall, is one of the cities receiving legal representation from Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a legal authority on illegal immigration.

The City of Albertville is considering hiring Kobach as legal council. He was invited by Mayor Lindsey Lyons and councilman Chuck Ellis to provide insight into remedies dealing with illegal immigration.

Last week in this space, I gave my opinion that “Kobach had not passed my smell test, not yet,” and I still have the same concern. I am pleased that the Albertville Council decided to take more time on this issue before retaining Kobach, if they do at all.

Emotions on that column are strong, both for and against. Both Ellis and Kobach were given space to respond to my opinion on Tuesday.

You may be interested in Ms. Dingman’s opinion, as well. She served three terms on the Farmers Branch City Council, leaving office in 1987. She is the first woman ever elected to that council, has lived in Farmers Branch since 1970 and has been a leader on a number of local committees.

Ms. Dingman wrote, “I live in Farmers Branch, Texas. As a former city council person, I have closely followed our city’s anti-immigration fight since the beginning.

“I have researched Kris Kobach, who was mentioned the first time this issue came up. Our mayor said he was an expert in immigration law who would help the city on a pro bono basis. I have requested copies of all the legal bills the city has accrued since the start of litigation in 2007. We will have paid almost $4 million in legal fees at the end of this fiscal year (Sept 30, 2010).

“Mr. Kobach was paid $100,000 of that. So much for pro bono. Kobach is closely connected with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose agenda is to use cities and states to test out their immigration legislation to see if it is constitutional.

“Both of our city’s ordinances were written by Kobach and both were ruled unconstitutional. I believe our city’s taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill for the benefit of a national organization that is never mentioned in any discussion of the issue.”

Read the entire article here.

Kris Kobach, the far right-wing nativist attorney Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s hired to train the MCSO in immigration matters, is receiving $300 per hour, plus expenses, including airline tickets to and from Arizona.

Though Arpaio’s Chief Deputy David Hendershott surmised in his recent deposition in the civil rights lawsuit Melendres vs. Arpaio that Kobach was making anywhere from $250-$300 per hour, to be paid from the MCSO’s RICO slush fund, I just got the official contract with Kobach from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

Read the entire article here.

Another blog exposed Kobach’s nativist-for-hire racket and losing tendencies this week. Krazykriskobach.com is dedicated to ensuring “that Kris Kobach does not ever hold an elected office again. We are not a group of Republicans, nor are we partisan Democrats. We’re simply a group of attentive Kansans literally sickened by the thought of Mr. Kobach ever collecting another dime of salary from Kansas taxpayers.”

The last few months have been less than ideal for Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Kraziest politico. First, news surfaced that Kobach’s tenure at the Kansas GOP was marred by serious mismanagement that may eventually result in some hefty fines for the new Administration.

Shortly after that, Kobach’s quest to enrich his personal finances by suing state governments suffered another embarrassing defeat when he lost a major ruling in Idaho. This week brought a fresh blow to Kris’ personal tax-payer funded bank account, when a City Council in Albertville, Alabama decided to pass on Kobach’s legal services.

Why? Because he is too damn pricey, and his track record is awful. One City Council member describes him as being only “46 percent accurate”. That’s like flipping a coin except you have to pay $300,000 to hire a lawyer employed by a hate group and your odds are worse.

The Albertville City Council determined that Kobach’s inexplicably expensive legal services were not worth it to the taxpayers. Which isn’t surprising, because he’s running a racket.

In a post last month, krazykriskobach.com wrote:

Kris Kobach has turned his anti-immigration platform into a quest for personal profit. By way of examples, he was paid more than $100,000 for a failed lawsuit in Pennsylvania, and up to $275,000 for his role in a Missouri lawsuit.

If that sounds like a racket, keep in mind that it costs the taxpayers a lot more to defend against his legal antics. Kansas taxpayers personally had to foot a $175,000 tab to defend against another one of his lawsuits in 2004 (he lost this one too).

Yikes! Looks like the public is starting to put the pieces together on Kobach. The big picture seems to be that of a scummy politician making gobs of money off hate.

Embattled by numerous reports of its ties to white nationalists, The Center For Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington D.C.-based think thank that strongly opposes immigration reform, lashed out today against advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Council of La Raza for participating in “smear” attacks and “manipulating the press” on the immigration issue.

But in the end, it was CIS executive director Mark Krikorian who justified his own smears, defending his groups’ labeling of immigrants as “third-world gold diggers” by calling such rhetoric “colorful language that was too colorful.”

The CIS event, held this morning in Washington, was organized to premiere CIS’s newest report, “Immigration and the SPLC,” a quasi-investigative look at the watchdog group’s research and financial records.

It’s no secret why CIS had dedicated a 27-page report to disparage the SPLC and other entities like the NCLR, a Latino advocacy organization. Both of the targeted organizations have been steadfastly producing research that ties the Center and other anti-immigration groups to white nationalism and racist rhetoric.

But rather than actually responding to anything said about CIS, the report focuses on times when SPLC allegedly took quotes from other anti-immigration groups out of context. The report also blames the media for being too “cooperative” when citing SPLC, and questions the objectivity of the watchdog group for working with pro-immigration groups like the NCLR.

In an effort to get to the bottom of some of these claims, I asked Krikorian a question, about an instance, cited by SPLC, where one of CIS’s reports (no longer on the Web site) referred to immigrants as “third-world gold diggers.”

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

Embattled by numerous reports of its ties to white nationalists, The Center For Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington D.C.-based think thank that strongly opposes immigration reform, lashed out today against advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Council of La Raza for participating in “smear” attacks and “manipulating the press” on the immigration issue.

But in the end, it was CIS executive director Mark Krikorian who justified his own smears, defending his groups’ labeling of immigrants as “third-world gold diggers” by calling such rhetoric “colorful language that was too colorful.”

The CIS event, held this morning in Washington, was organized to premiere CIS’s newest report, “Immigration and the SPLC,” a quasi-investigative look at the watchdog group’s research and financial records.

It’s no secret why CIS had dedicated a 27-page report to disparage the SPLC and other entities like the NCLR, a Latino advocacy organization. Both of the targeted organizations have been steadfastly producing research that ties the Center and other anti-immigration groups to white nationalism and racist rhetoric.

But rather than actually responding to anything said about CIS, the report focuses on times when SPLC allegedly took quotes from other anti-immigration groups out of context. The report also blames the media for being too “cooperative” when citing SPLC, and questions the objectivity of the watchdog group for working with pro-immigration groups like the NCLR.

In an effort to get to the bottom of some of these claims, I asked Krikorian a question, about an instance, cited by SPLC, where one of CIS’s reports (no longer on the Web site) referred to immigrants as “third-world gold diggers.”

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

The New York Times’ Robbie Brown wrote:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Neighbors were chagrined last week when the police here found the body of a 75-year-old woman who had frozen to death, alone in her house, during unexpectedly frigid weather. Last year, part of Highway 5 in Rock Hill, S.C., was renamed for her.

But they were shocked this week when they learned that the woman, Juanita W. Goggins, had been a civil rights trailblazer who in 1974 became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina legislature.

Now residents of this normally neighborly Southern capital say they are feeling regretful, and slightly guilty, for allowing one of its most revered figures to disappear into a sleepy ranch house with little company. Possibly mentally ill, living without running water or heat, Ms. Goggins is believed to have died on Feb. 20 — when temperatures dropped below freezing — but her body was not discovered for 11 days.

Several neighbors in her elderly, mostly black community in downtown Columbia said they had learned the full scope of Ms. Goggins’s accomplishments only from her obituaries. At the peak of her political career, in the 1970s, she twice visited President Jimmy Carter at the White House and was the first black woman appointed to the United States Civil Rights Commission.

In the legislature, where she represented Rock Hill, on the northern border of the state, for three terms in the 1970s, Ms. Goggins, a Democrat, helped pass key legislation for improving elementary school education and public health. Last year, a stretch of Highway 5 was renamed in her honor.

To read more about Juanita Goggins, click here. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12frozen.html