By JOSE de la ISLA, Hispanic Link News Service

After trying for laughs in Hollywood nightclubs, game shows and the Latino comedy TV circuit, comedian Ernie G. got a chance to make some staid business and government types chuckle at a National Council of La Raza conference a few years ago. He told them how he got to college.

Bill Moyers commented on his PBS program that when President Barack Obama came into office, people remarked, "This is a Rooseveltian moment."

James K. Galbraith, the son of the famous economist and a formidable academic in his own right, responded, "The public certainly wanted a Rooseveltian moment," but he added, Obama's situation "is much more like Herbert Hoover's."

A big battle is brewing in of all places the library.

The armed men injecting themselves into the town hall meetings on universal health care remind me why it is important to tell the thugs to go home the way Carmelita did.

There's a reason to truncate that kind of serial intimidation, whether by a government or by unregulated militias. In his book "Ringside Seat to a Revolution," David Dorado Romo brings this to light.

During his whirlwind trip to Guadalajara to meet with, Mexico President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President Obama disclosed that his planned action on U.S. immigration reform has now been put off until 2010.

In March, President Obama signed a bill that, among other things, ended a pilot program that allowed some Mexican cargo trucks to travel on U.S. highways. Mexico responded quickly with retaliatory tariffs on 89 agricultural and industrial products from 40 states, affecting about $2.4 billion worth of goods and tens of thousands of jobs.

During one week in July, the news from the U.S.-Mexico border region read like The Police Gazette. For younger readers unacquainted with that publication, it was a tabloid circulated from 1845 until 1982. It mostly ran crime stories. Each testosterone-toned issue featured murder, mayhem, the wild, wild west, prostitutes and burlesque, sometimes touching the edges of the obscene.

The three days of confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court came down to just a handful of utterances, most notably the one about "empathy."

I was one of the students hearing Professor Homer G. Barnett's lectures on the history of anthropology at the University of Oregon the year before he retired. That was more than three decades ago.

James Von Brunn, 88, is the alleged lone wolf who went into the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10. Steven Jones, a 39-year-old security guard, in an act of kindness, opened the door for the elderly gunman who had a concealed rifle and shot Jones in the chest at close range.