There’s a cute piece in the Tuesday WashPost about how excited the Hispanics who “have long toiled in the fields” are about the prospect of voting for Bustamante:

“Bustamante!” exclaimed Maria Munoz outside the travel agency where she works. “He is the only one to vote for, no one else. He thinks like us.”

That is a startling admission, but there you have it. There is an entire group of people, to whom Ms. Munoz refers as “us,” who think like Bustamante.

There’s a problem, though. (Not whether to call them Hispanics or Latinos, as I don’t know the difference and do not know that they care either.) A lot of them, it seems, want to retain Joey Davis. The nodus is this:

At the same time, they face a quandary. Polls show Latinos evenly split on whether to recall Gov. Gray Davis (D). Some feel the recall is unfair and say they will vote to keep Davis in office, even if it means losing their best chance yet to elect a Latino governor. Others so badly want Bustamante that they plan to vote to dump Davis and vote for him. But that brings a risk of electing actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, new polls suggest, is the leading candidate to replace Davis, running ahead of Bustamante.

Hispanics make up, according to the WashPost story, some 14% of all registered voters. They are a smaller portion of the electorate than are Tom McClintock supporters (18%). (And I doubt the two groups — Hispanics and McClintock voters — are mutually exclusive. There plenty of conservative Latinos in California, I’m sure, but…)

The story says: 100 percent of California Latinos want to retain Davis, but half of them will not vote to do so simply because they want to vote for Cruz Bustamante. Who conducted these polls, and how many of them are there? Did every poll show this? If two polls showed there was the Latino dichotomy and ten did not, one could still truthfully say that “polls show Latinos evenly split.”

“Arnold is fake — that’s what a lot of us think now,” Villanueva said here in Delano. “He doesn’t realize that the driver’s license law, just like Prop 187, is about respect.”

Villanueva angrily said that one his friends, an illegal immigrant who is a farm hand, had to go to court a few days ago for the first time because a police officer caught him driving without a license.

Villenueva’s friend, the illegal immigrant, is a fake. His friend is breaking the law by residing in the country illegally, and thus is entitled to respect only for his life as he is escorted back home.