Oh boy. John & Ken aren't going to be happy about this one.

Latinos are on track to become the biggest ethnic group in California.

That's right, the land of Ozzie and Harriet is being taken over by brown people.

According to just-released U.S. Census figures ...

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There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how Cinco de Mayo isn't a big Mexican holiday, not like the 4th of July is in the United States.

It's true.

A just-released book from UCLA professor David Hayes-Bautista, El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition, argues that Cinco's prominence in America isn't the result of just beer-company marketing.

It was a deliberate move on the part of Latinos in California:

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Mmm. That's one tasty demographic.

He who gets the Latino vote could take the whole chimichanga, beans and rice included, during this year's presidential election.

The fight took to Twitter his week and Republicans and Democrats battled over ... the word Chimichanga. L.A. cartoonist and satirist Lalo Alcaraz has been all over it, and some have taken to calling it #chimichangagate.

Really. It started like this:

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CNN

Just stop.

Despite the increasing, oft-hilarious attempts of Republican candidates to convince the crucial Latino voter base that its interests are best served by the red party (including a fugly new outreach website), Latinos still swing Democrat more often than not.

Because name-dropping Sen. Mario Rubio (R-Florida) at every stop on the campaign trail thankfully isn't enough to drown out the redneck racism at the party's core.

So how did Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa manage to lose a weekend CNN debate on "Which party better suits Latino voters"?

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http://kingdrake1.tumblr.com

Although hate crime in L.A. County was recently reported to be at a 21-year low (PDF), an L.A. immigrants' rights group wants it to be known that such attacks targeting Latinos are up nearly 50 percent across the state (PDF).

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles thinks that much of this crime is "anti-immigrant."

The group's executive director, Angelica Salas, even called out the rhetoric of right-wing radio talkers John & Ken (KFI AM 640) today:

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NBC

President Obama is one cool, laid-back dude.

If he's sweating the upcoming election, you sure wouldn't know it. Even with this toilet-bowl economy, a recent New York Times Magazine piece saying he's an underdog to win reelection, and a key, Latino electorate that's not as yes-we-can about this guy as it was in 2008, Obama's chillin' like a villain.

We actually like his do-nothing strategy for securing the Latino vote:

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KFI

John and Ken.

A recent apology by conservative radio talk-show hosts John & Ken (KFI AM 640) expressed some "regret" for broadcasting the phone number of an immigrants' rights advocate who subsequently fielded hate-filled calls.

But that wasn't enough to keep major advertisers from leaving the show following a campaign by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which argues that John & Ken have exhibited a strong history of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino fervor.

The latest advertiser to bail?

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johnandkenshow.com

John y Ken.

Check out our story about how Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain wants to (jokingly) "electrify" the border fence, here.

Update: NHMC spokeswoman Rosalia Tenorio says the advertisers walking away from John & Ken are Verizon and AT&T Wireless as well as Vons and Ralphs, the last two of which are not currently running spots on the show but have in the past. First posted at 3:38 p.m. on Tuesday.

At least three major advertisers are pulling out of the John & Ken talk show on KFI AM 640 following pressure from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the org's leader told us today.

The NHMC planned to announced which advertisers have pulled out tomorrow before staging a protest and press conference outside of KFI's Burbank studios Thursday, NHMC president Alex Nogales told the Weekly.

He said many Latinos were fed up with anti-immigrant "hate speech" on the show (the pair also appears regularly on the Los Angeles Times' sister TV station KTLA), considered by many to come from a right-wing perspective that targets conservative white men.

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rnclatinos.com

Not to be outdone by Obama and the brown-nosing Democrats, the Republican National Committee has launched a full-scale Latino outreach effort for the 2012 presidential race. At their convention this year in L.A., for the first time ever, Republicans hired a (gasp!) Spanish translator. And Univision reports that "the first state-level operatives it plans to put into the field will be tasked with reaching out to Latino voters."

Guess when the minority starts to become the majority (or at least the swing vote), politicians have no choice but to start acknowledging their presence. Latinos even get their own GOP website...

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@pithfork via Twitter

Think he'll peek out the window this time?

Our once-worshipped POTUS has a lot of hearts to recapture before the 2012 election. Like a bad ex that keeps coming back to convince us we still love him (OK, fine, we kind of still do; how cute is he in the donut meme???), Obama's making the U.S.A. rounds like a madman these days.

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Did John & Ken take the skewerfest too far this time?

KFI radio personalities John & Ken, who spoon-feed SoCal's uber-conservatives (and, unfortunately, 1 million more Americans) exactly what they want to hear for a living, are usually pretty harmless. Perpetuating a culture of hate and fear for Latinos, yes -- but it's easy enough to tune out their minuteman-lite drivel. Twist of the dial, and we can forget they just blamed Dodger Stadium violence on L.A. Mexicans, endorsed Mickey Kaus, etc.

Last Thursday, though, they crossed the line. It's hard for a professional immigrants-rights advocate ignore the Latino-bashing when it's all up in his voice mailbox:

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tetrabrain

Cover your eyes, people.

We caused quite a stir recently by noting that Latinos are now the largest minority group on American college campuses. Critics noted that many of them are at community colleges, and one blog even decried the high-profile Latino products of universities (as if every corrupt white politician has his race's dominance of the four-year game to blame).

Well, we're back with more scary statistics about Latinos, aimed specifically at those same critics. This is the U.S. Census-derived stuff that makes some older white folks check their locks. And it's just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 through Oct. 15).

We aim to scare you (and it's not even October) with stuff like the following:

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Long Beach Post

Key to redistricting: Keep incumbents happy.

Leave it to L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina to play peacekeeper in her five-member board's redistricting battle -- standing up for the civil rights of Latino voters while placating Republican Don Knabe by letting him have some of his white people back.

Win-win!

Molina says her new map "presents a different way to achieve the same objective" as the controversial draft she proposed alongside Mark-Ridley Thomas, the other minority suit on the board (he's black), on August 9. But she knows full well it'll be the popular child of the two. That's because...

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Long Beach Post

Supervisor Don Knabe, looking particularly white in the Martin Luther King Jr. parade

Is Don Knabe is on the verge of getting swallowed by L.A. County's rising Latino tide?

The two minority members on the five-person L.A. County Board of Supervisors -- Gloria Molina and Mark Ridley-Thomas, Latina and black, respectively -- are speaking up for the booming Latino voter base today (now at one-third of the entire county), supporting a plan that would make them the 62 percent majority in Supervisor Don Knabe's voting district.

This isn't welcome news for the very white, very Republican pol:

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Ana Garcia: 6 p.m. golden girl, no more.

A cross lettersent to KNBC President and General Manager Craig Robinson by the California Chicano News Media Association yesterday points to a strange trend, given L.A.'s booming Latino population: Five Latino news anchors working for Channel 4 have been demoted in the past year-and-a-half.

It's a mirror image of the Latino exodus of 1994, when five reporters were dropped from the station all at once, and KNBC "was accused of bias against Latino journalists," writes Julio Morán, CCNMA director. While only one of the five is actually gone this time (Pablo Pierera), Morán wants to know why the rest were pulled from prime time:

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cafepress.com

The richest guy in the world (Carlos Slim Helú) is Mexican. But when you think wealth, you don't think Latino. And, well, you're mostly right.

A new report from the Pew Research Center says that during this Great Recession, the wealth gap between whites and Latinos and whites and African Americans got even bigger.

It actually doubled in the last 20 years:

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Marvin Norwood, 30

Update: Marvin Norwood's carpool buddy says he's not the kind of guy you want to provoke.

Up until last Thursday, everyone -- including witnesses to the Bryan Stow beating, LAPD officials and California's conservative peanut gallery -- thought March's territorial Dodger Stadium assault was orchestrated by two tattooed Latino men.

"This is a latino problem," wrote a Los Angeles Times commenter. "Drunk, thug, gangster rap raised, uneducated, banger stereotypical shaved head 'what you looking at' young male latinos." On the LA Weekly report, someone said: "Just comes to show how the typical Latino/Hispanic mind thinks."

(And those were on the nicer end of the spectrum.)

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Are the glory days back again for Carlos Montes?

On May 17 at 5 a.m., the L.A. County Sheriff's Department upended the Alhambra home of 1960s Latino-rights legend Carlos Montes (still kickin' at 63 years old), shattering his front door and seizing his computer, cell phones and activist files -- a raid that slipped by media at the time.

"I was totally asleep. And then I hear this loud noise and crashing at my front door," he told reporters outside the Alhambra courthouse on June 16. "I look from my bedroom and I see people with helmets, guns up at their shoulders, you know, yelling."

Not an unfamiliar scene...

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Sheriff Baca just got sued.

Updated after the jump: The Sheriff's Department says this is ICE's problem, not theirs.

This should be an interesting lawsuit -- not only for the future of immigration reform, but for frustrated journalists who repeatedly get their California Public Records Act requests brushed off like mosquitos by angry secretaries who apparently have better things to do than keep our government transparent.

In this case, the PRA requests were to the L.A. County Sheriff's Department -- inquiring into its correspondence with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

You know what that means:

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Jeanne Raya, a Latina Democrat on the commission

Uh oh: La Raza is rising! California's voting districts are getting browner/bluer by the second. Before we know it, this'll be the goddamn Nation of Aztlán, are we right?

The state's historic vote to let a group of 14 guys and gals with no political ties draw up new districts for the State Assembly, State Senate and U.S. Congress made the puzzle of rhyme-less, gerrymandered districts that politicians had drawn to get themselves re-elected almost unrecognizable. (Evidenced by the silent scream of agony coming from Sacramento in the days following the release of the Citizen Redistricting Commission's first draft.)

But of course, as with any change in status quo that could give marginalized groups a stronger voice, paranoid white men...

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