Minutemen in Tennessee

From the AP (via the Birmingham News):

A volunteer movement that vows to guard America from a wave of illegal immigration has spread from the dusty U.S.-Mexican border to the verdant hollows of Appalachia.

At least 40 anti-immigration groups have popped up nationally, inspired by the Minuteman Project that rallied hundreds this year to patrol the Mexican border in Arizona.

"It's like O'Leary's cow has kicked over the lantern. The fire has just started now," said Carl "Two Feathers" Whitaker, an American Indian activist and perennial gubernatorial candidate who runs the Tennessee Volunteer Minutemen, aimed at exposing those who employ illegals.

While there's nobody in the U.S. who has quite the same perspective as Native Americans on the notion of "illegal immigration," Whitaker is perhaps going after the wrong people here: Latinos are of course a lot more likely to be Native American themselves than their U.S. employers are. (His own credentials as an indigenous person are apparently in doubt as well.)

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Fatherland Homeland Security continues that agency's mission of injecting creepy quasi-fascist vocabulary into our political discourse while not really disavowing vigilantism: "Homeland security is a shared responsibility, and the department believes the American public plays a critical role in helping to defend the homeland."

Oh, and there's this:

A group leading patrols of the California border urged volunteers to bring baseball bats, mace, pepper spray and machetes to patrol the border. They backed off the recommendation, but insisted on another weapon when they started patrols Saturday: guns.