She told blogger Ruben Navarette, Jr., who writes at pajamasmedia.com, that demonizing Latinos is not the way to go if Republicans want to lead on the issue.

“My view is that the immigration discussion, the rhetoric the Republican Party uses, is not helpful; it’s not helpful in a state with the Latino population we have,” Whitman said during a brief interview following a speech at a George W. Bush Institute conference on the economy. “We as a party are going to have to make some changes, how we think about immigration, and how we talk about immigration.”

Somos Republican founder DeeDee Garcia Blase applauded Whitman’s attempt to tone down the rhetoric, but said anti-immigrant stances from Latino Republican groups such as the Latino National Republican Coalition and the Republican National Hispanic Assembly also send the wrong message.

“Embracing these laws are not the true pulse and sentiment of our overall Latino community,” Garcia Blase said. “The GOP must stop going to Latino Republican tokens who will tell them what they want to hear.”

Citizens in Maine will vote on a new tax structure to pull out of the spend-and-slash boom-and-bust cycle that characterizes state budgets across the country. The aim is to diversify revenue streams. It would mean lower income tax for all but higher sales tax and new taxes on a wider variety of services. The new plan passed as a law in Maine last year in the legislature and voters are going to the polls today to approve or reject it. Ads for and against are entertaining.

In South Carolina, state Rep. Nikki Haley (born: Nimrata Randhawa) is the GOP frontrunner to replace Mark Sanford, who made news for trying and failing to reject stimulus money and disappearing to “hike the Appalachian Trail” with his Argentine mistress and giving a wacko press conference about it and writing really terrible love emails. Haley has been endorsed by Sanford’s wife and Sarah Palin and pretty much everyone who counts. But people are coming out of the woodwork claiming to have hiked the Appalachian Trail with her. She denies the allegations. She is also an Indian American and was recently called a “raghead” by state Sen. Jake Knotts, an enlightened supporter of her opponent Andre Bauer. Haley is one of the GOP ladies or “pink elephants” Palin is cheering this cycle. Colorado’s U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton so far is not one of them.

The California GOP gubernatorial primary. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman faces Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner. Whitman has spent in the neighborhood of $80 million (in the primary!) and Poizner something like $25 million (in the primary!). It’s California, so immigration is huge. Poizner supports Arizona’s tough new SB 1070; Whitman opposes it. The winner goes up against attorney general, former Oakland mayor and onetime “governor moonbeam” Jerry Brown.

“Queen Birther” Orly Taitz is the woman who suspects (knows!) Obama was born in Kenya and is hiding his birth certificate, which is a fake anyway, and so is ineligible for the office Americans voted him into and also a hypnotized Muslim doing the work of an Islamist puppet master pulling strings from somewhere in Africa or the Middle East. She is a lawyer, apparently, and is running as a Republican for secretary of state in California. She could actually win, at least according to Politico.

** Special note: Arkansas! We meant to include the big runoff election in Arkansas, where Democrats are watching closely to see whether incumbent Blanche Lincoln, object of progressive scorn for her perceived catering to the GOP at the expense of her constituents, can survive a grassroots run mounted by Bill Halter. Observers see this race as a weather vane for the party’s chances for success in November and as a gauge of anti-Washington sentiment.

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The San Jose Mercury News last week reported that Whitman, seeking the Republican nomination to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010, filed a 2008 tax return revealing a $1.15 million contribution to the campaign to preserve Telluride Valley Floor.

Anyone familiar with T-Ride knows Valley Floor is the nearly 600-acre parcel that for years was the subject of a bitter battle to either preserve it as open space or develop it in typical resort-town condo-schlock style. Whitman’s campaign swears she only contributed to its preservation after developers had received $50 million for the parcel in town condemnation proceedings.

That’s not a good enough excuse for a government land grab in the opinion of state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, who’s also seeking the GOP nod to replace the term-limited Schwarzenegger. His campaign also pointed to Whitman’s $200,000 contribution to the Environmental Defense Fund for its work in preserving a California river delta while publicly opposing the project.

“What we see now is that Meg Whitman is a dishonest billionaire and writes huge checks to opponents of California farmers while telling campaign lies,” Poizner spokesman Jarrod Agen told the Mercury News. “Will the real Meg Whitman please stand up?”

Whitman spokesman Tucker Bounds fired back: “That statement is from a hysterical spokesman of a campaign that’s on the ropes.”

Whitman’s own website claims she’s in a dead heat in polling with the only major Democrat still in the race, former Gov. Jerry Brown.

The Telluride Watch newspaper riffed on the controversy by pointing out that being conservative and supporting conservation are not mutually exclusive. Nor is environmentalism an inherently Democratic value. This from the Watch:

“’The party is coming off of two straight election losses,’ said Jim DiPeso, policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection, who suggested that the GOP is in the midst of trying to figure out whether it’s the ‘big tent of Ronald Reagan’ or a ‘straight jacket’ where only people who adhere to certain strict ideologies need apply.

“’Since when is it not conservative for a Republican to care about land conservation?’ he said.

“’Conservatives pioneered the conservation of open space,’ he continued, noting Republican President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in expanding the national forests, parks and wildlife refuges, and that President Herbert Hoover proclaimed the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument.

“’Clearly Teddy Roosevelt knew that the protection of our natural heritage was important for keeping the country strong,’ he said.

“And not for nothing – Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and also established the Environmental Protection Agency, the REP website notes.”

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