Do you support rigorous measures to strengthen border security and tighten immigration controls? If so, you're probably a 'nativist' - read racist - or a rube, or very possibly both.

Don't believe me? Just ask Neal Gabler. Here's what he had to say on this evening's Fox News Watch:

"The conservative nativists, and maybe that's a redundancy, thought they had a winner here. What a great issue they have," he said sarcastically. "You can beat up on aliens and get all of those white folks for the 2006 election."

Conservative columnist Jim Pinkerton weighed in with two points of note:

"Bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Michelle Malkin have made the point that the MSM, especially the LA Times, hid the most inflammatory element of those pictures from their readers and viewers by not showing the profusion of Mexican flags and highlighting the relatively few American flags."

Edited out of the two-page opus of little ersatz Notable Quotables for April Fools Day were two entries satirizing Chris Matthews and his tendency to burp movie citations about every five minutes of "Hardball." Geoff Dickens, who is the official watcher of "Hardball," weaved real MSNBC sentences with imagined ones:

Matthews: "Howard, this President is trying to distract the public from the images they see every day in Iraq by faulting the media, the good guys! But, I mean, this reminds me of that old Groucho Marx gag: Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes? But, seriously, what does the President need to do to stop his slide in the polls before the elections?

Howard Fineman, Newsweek: "Chris, as the midterms approach, what Bush can't do is run as Tom Cruise any more, not run as Top Gun. That's not going to work any more, I think. He's trying to run as Jack Bauer on domestic security."

Rich Noyes suggested the other day that one reason Likud and the Israeli right wing was crushed at the polls was some old-fashioned liberal media bias. Perhaps. But my old friend Joel Rosenberg (best-selling fiction writer) blogs about his dinner table at the Radio and TV News Correspondents dinner, and how he explained the Israeli election returns. I thought: hmm, no wonder we haven't had a lot of reporting from Israel on American TV. Things are pretty good:

Ehud Olmert and his Kadima party did not win as big as they expected (29 seats when they were riding high in the mid-40s just two months ago). But they still won. Olmert will likely put together a left-wing coalition of somewhere around 65-70 seats. Every member will support his game-changing plan to give away the vast majority of the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria to the terrorist government of Hamas. He has said he won't let them join if they don't.

The Israeli right got crushed. Likud dropped from 38 seats to just 12. Already efforts are underway to drive Bibi Netanyahu out of politics forever. Other nationalist and religious parties did better than expected. But together, the right has lost the initiative. Why?

Think two words: secure and exhausted.

Israelis feel more secure today than at any other time in their modern history. A former top official in Israeli military intelligence put it to me this way over breakfast at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem last June: Saddam is gone. Arafat is dead. They have peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. The Syrian military has been driven out of Syria. The security fence and dramatically improved Israeli intelligence and police work have stopped 99% of the suicide bombings. The economy is surging. Tourism is surging. Life isn't perfect. But when has it ever been for the Jewish people. Right now, Israelis feel it's about as good as it gets.

Wow, these quotes are hard to believe, aren't they?

Dan Gainor reports to me that the Norwegian paper Aftenposten noted that a "comedian" named Otto Jespersen took to his TV show to burn pages of the Old Testament, and riots did not ensue:

The burly, middle-aged Norwegian seems to have a thing for fires: He's perhaps best known for an American flag-burning stunt on national TV three years ago, to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq.

This week, with the help of the local fire brigade, Jespersen lit a bonfire in front of Ålesund's city hall. With cameras rolling for his TV show "Rikets Røst," Jespersen first started burning some Norwegian books. Then, with the willing cooperation of Ålesund Mayor Arve Tonning, he threw paper money on the flames.

Regular readers of this column know the delight that has been taken in skewering Ellen Ratner for her loopy liberalism, as here, here and here.

You can thus imagine my surprise when, on this morning's 'Long & the Short of It' segment on Fox & Friends Weekend, Ratner offered up some tough talk on immigration. Ratner's remarks were simpatico with the take of Jim Pinkerton, the Newsday and Tech Central columnist who represents the conservative side of the equation.

An aside: Pinkerton is one of the rare conservative commentators willing to roll up his sleeves on government reform. Have a look at his recent TCS column regarding a radical cabinet re-organization proposal by former GOP congressman Bob Walker that would shrink the number of cabinet departments from fifteen down to five.

Brian Stelter at TV Newser broke the story Friday that "Good Morning America Weekend executive producer John Green has been suspended for one month after his personal e-mails were leaked to the Drudge Report and Page Six, TVNewser has learned. Phyllis McGrady made the announcement at GMA's morning meeting today. A number of ABC News staffers are outraged that Green's personal messages have become a public embarrassment. Some have speculated that the messages were leaked by a disgruntled former employee."

Howard Kurtz picked up the story in Saturday's Washington Post:

ABC News suspended the executive producer of the weekend edition of "Good Morning America" yesterday over a pair of leaked e-mails in which he used inflammatory language to slam President Bush and Madeleine Albright.