The ongoing debate over the role of illegal aliens in the U.S. workforce has sunk to a new, saturated fat-filled low. According to the New York Times, Florida-based Burger King has spearheaded an effort to rescind carefully crafted agreements between labor activists and major fast food chains, including Taco Bell and McDonald’s, to pass a penny per pound surcharge on to migrant workers who pick tomatoes, many of whom are illegal.

Meanwhile, in a nod to its master, the state’s largest grower’s group, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, said that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers calling the practice “pretty much near un-American.”  The group is threatening to fine any grower who defies its directive $100,000.Give me your tired, your poor…..whatever Emma Lazarus, what do you know?  These days the patriotic thing to do is to line the pockets of the robber barrons, er…private equity mangers.

Meanwhile, on the left coast, illustrating the gaping and growing gulf between the nation’s xenophobes and xenophiles, producers are shopping around a new reality show called, “Who Wants to Marry a U.S. Citizen.”The show’s creator Adrian Martinez told Reuters that contestants – mostly Hispanic immigrants – are already signed up and describes the concept as “this generation’s ‘Dating Game,’ but with a twist – it aims to show love knows no borders.”

Judging by the anticipated surge of reality TV due to the ongoing writers strike, the show might have a good chance of being picked up and taking over where Congress and the Bush administration dropped the ball on their own legal path to citizenship.  Plus it will certainly be more interesting than Big Brother 23.

Terrorism.  Well, sort of.  At least that’s what our federal government thinks.

CQ Politics revealed earlier this month that the FBI, in 2005 and 2006, mined data from San Francisco-based grocery stores hoping to connect increased sales of Middle Eastern food to the presence of Iranian spies and Hezbollah operatives seeking to attack inside the U.S.  The program has since been nixed, reportedly because higher-ups thought it “ridiculous” and “possibly illegal.”  (The FBI, for the record denied it had such a program.)

But while federal law enforcement agents were (reportedly) engaging in this folly, serious security breaches were growing unchecked in some of the nation’s largest airports and even within the FBI itself.

Today we learned that a Lebanese national somehow managed to arrange a fake marriage and pass an FBI background check that landed her jobs as an FBI agent and later as a CIA case officer.  She then stole classified information on terrorist activities and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.

And last week the Chicago Tribune reported on a federal raid at O’Hare International Airport that uncovered at least 110 fake security badges issued to an airport contractor and provided to 100 workers assigned to jobs in restricted areas.  At least a quarter of the workers were illegal immigrants.  Most of them were never subjected to background checks or fingerprinted as required by federal authorities.

This follows on news in August that dozens of guns were stolen from checked luggage at O’Hare, Seattle’s Sea-Tac and even Washington Reagan National Airport during the past couple of years – the same period of time the FBI was supposedly running its gastronomic investigations.  Dare we assume that the illegitimate workers and the missing guns might be connected?  Law enforcement isn’t sure, but think the guns were “probably sold or used in crimes.”

Last year, well before last week’s raid, O’Hare spokeswoman Wendy Abrams reportedly said the missing guns – belonging mostly to law enforcement or military personnel – presented “no risk to airport safety and security.”  Yet the tenor of federal officials was decidedly different last week when they admitted that the investigation that netted the illegal workers “identified national security vulnerabilities.”

CQ reported that the FBI’s falafel dragnet… “is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots,” but maybe, just maybe, they’re just barking up the wrong trees.

I wrote an article this week about how airports are beefing up the amenities for in-transit passengers, which is welcome and well overdue.  But one has to wonder whether they, much like our government has done since 9/11, may just be trying to distract us from the really scary stuff going on behind the scenes.

Anyone who travels outside the U.S. has experienced it.  As far back as President Bush’s very first year in office, people living in other countries seem to be interested in one thing: Did you vote for George W. Bush? 

Sensing the growing skeptisicm and then later hostility, and not wanting to call attention to myself by engaging in a political discussion, I always answered with a quick “no” and then moved on to another topic. 

So it is with interest that I started following Amar Bakshi’s Post Global project called “How the World Sees America.”  Amar examines international opinion about Americans and American policy and finds a striking disconnect.  With polls showing “anti-Americanism reaching all-time highs,” he finds vitriol directed more at American policies than Americans themselves — a small silver lining in a very dark cloud.

Discouragingly, in this country, it seems people have a hard time making this distinction between bad policies and bad people.  I don’t know about you, but this political mailer in Monroe County, NY stikes me as repulsive.   It attempts to conflate Democrats, illegal immigrants, terrorists and even welfare recipients (see background graphic) into one boiling cauldron of fear. 

Interestingly, this same general area of the world (upstate NY) is working hard to bill itself as tolerant.  Sounds to me like they’re trying to convince themselves they’re something they’re not too sure they are.  I’d say they have a long way, a very long way, to go.

While running errands today, I came across an increasingly popular sight.  Balls.  No, not the bouncing kind.  Fake testicles hanging on the tow hitch of a pickup truck.  These were golden and accompanied by an oversized sticker in the rear window of the apple red pickup that read, “My aching nuts.”  Less than an hour later, another pickup idled at a stop light in front of me.  In this vehicle’s back window was another sticker that read, “Nice pussy.”Calgon, please take me away!  Now I am not easily offended and hardly consider myself a feminist.  As an only girl, I’ve been surrounded by machismo my entire life.  But this crap is offensive and misogynistic to say the least.

Which reminds me of my friend Michael Winship’s April 4 column, “Roll Away the Stone of Ignorance,” in which he recalls a recent United Airlines flight on which passengers were reseated because of group of Hasidic men refused to share a row with a female passenger.  The attendants asked for cooperation despite the fact that it “probably violates about a dozen interstate commerce and sex discrimination statutes.”In “a world that continues to let religious strife, division and ignorance gnaw away at our basic shared humanity and, yes, faith,” wrote Winship, these kinds of incidents should indeed cause us pause.  But it is also the everyday things we see and hear, such as the golden balls and their accompanying hyper-masculine missive – easily dismissed as simply moronic, insensitive or vulgar – that also contribute to a growing culture of misogyny and intimidation.

This intimidation is also happening increasingly in the most egalitarian of all places on Earth, the Internet.  Jessica Valenti, in the April 6 issue of UK’s The Guardian, recently wrote that, “While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore.” Such abuses as “extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevelant,” she writes.  Often these hateful epithets involve graphic suggestions of rape and sodomy and “on some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape mentality.”

According to Valenti, who herself was subject of an online snear campaign referred to as “boobgate” after being photographed with President Bill Clinton, quoted a recent study showing that “when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment,” to illustrate the pervasiveness of this problem.But an increase in gender insensitivity is not limited to the anonymity of the Web by any means.  Take for instance, the ever-caustic and controversial radio host, Don Imus, who is at this very moment being summarily skewered for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”  But even Revs. Sharpton and Jackson et al seem to be mostly upset with the racial connotation of Imus’s comment (nappy) and not the reference to the players’ supposed sexual proclivities (hos).

“Stupid men clap the ghorals in irons.  They close ranks, create religion, create morality, create laws, erect palisades and shut out the mountains.  None will go where they cannot.  The high grounds are lost forever,” wrote Indian novelist Tarun J. Tejpal in “The Alchemy of Desire.”These days there seem to be too many stupid men (and some women too).  Where have all the smart men gone?  Come on.  It’s time to stand up and defend the women you love.