The SPLC strikes gold!

The latest screaming headline over at "Hatewatch" reminds me of the scene in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre when Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston finally hit a rich vein of gold. You can just hear the cackles of joy from the Poverty Palace:

Four reputed white supremacist gang members have been arrested in connection with the vicious beating of a Latino man on Nov. 19 in Hemet, Calif. The victim, a 19-year-old whose name police would not release, was knocked unconscious and then repeatedly stomped and kicked in the head. He suffered permanent brain damage and has been placed in a long-term care facility. According to investigators, the attack was random, unprovoked and motivated purely by racial hatred.

Why the spine-tingling hype? Because, like the ill-fated gold miners in Sierra Madre, the SPLC have had to dig through a lot of fill dirt lately, and by that, I mean actual hate crime trends involving blacks and Latinos rather than the SPLC stereotype of eeeevil whites violently opposed to immigration. Check out this report, for example:

Hate crimes in Los Angeles rose to their highest level in five years last year, led by attacks between Latinos and blacks, county officials reported today. The annual report by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission showed hate crimes rose by 28% overall for a total of 763, with assault and vandalism leading the way.

The largest number involved Latino suspects against black victims; the second largest involved black suspects against Latino victims.

Despite the intense national debate over illegal immigration, hate crimes against immigrants decreased slightly.

Read that last sentence again, and you'll see why the SPLC thinks it's something to holler about when real, live white thugs are arrested in a hate crime. The perps are already in custody, and if guilty, will be convicted and punished.

But not until the SPLC milks the story for all it's worth, and then some.

Naturally, the SPLC frames this act of violence as the inevitable result of "anti-immigrant propaganda" from border security and immigration control activists. But there's a slight problem -- the SPLC's conclusions that anti-Latino hate crimes are on the rise are based on, um, "creative" data analysis, as the Federation for American Immigration Reform reveals:

The SPLC conveniently forgets to index the raw hate crime data with the population, a step always taken by the FBI to more accurately depict an increase or decrease in crime. Thus, when one indexes a 17 percent increase in hate crimes against Hispanics with a 67 percent increase in the Hispanic population between 1995 and 2006, it becomes clear that the rate of hate crimes against Hispanics has in fact dropped dramatically -- by about 40 percent.

Again, like Bogie and his partners digging in the Mexican high country, the SPLC is out for one thing, as Ken Silverstein reminds us -- the SPLC's fearmongering has enriched them to the point that their total assets are now $168 million, which is "more than the annual GDP of the Marshall Islands, and has the SPLC rapidly closing in on Tonga's GDP."