Governor Jan turns thumbs down on Arizona's "Religious Right to Hate" bill

Gov. Jan Brewer vetoes Arizona's "Religious Right to Hate" bill.

by Ken

Last night I reported ("From Arizona to K Street: Profiles in courage, 2014 right-wing-loon-style") on the dilemma confronting Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer concerning her state legislature's "Religious Right to Hate" bill, which would have allowed Arizonans to hate homosexuals any way they like as long as it's for religious reasons. In the end, Governor Jan has given in to the pressure to veto the bill. From ThinkProgress this evening (links onsite):

Facing Overwhelming Opposition, Arizona Governor Vetoes Anti-Gay Bill

BY ZACK FORD ON FEBRUARY 26, 2014 AT 7:51 PM

After a week of national backlash, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has vetoed SB 1062, which would have allowed religious beliefs to be used to justify discrimination against LGBT people and others. Explaining her veto, Brewer said, "I call them like I see them despite the cheers or boos from the crowd." She added that the bill does not address a specific concern and that she knows of no examples of how religious liberty has been under attack.

Opposition to the bill came from individuals and companies across the country, including the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee, Apple, and Mitt Romney. Many other states have introduced similar bills, some specifying that businesses could refuse services to marrying same-sex couples, but most have stalled or died, particularly those introduced this week during the backlash against Arizona.

This is not the first time Brewer has opposed Republican leadership; in fact, she vetoed this same bill last year as part of a vendetta against the Arizona legislature for not passing a budget. Last October, she urged Republicans in Congress to stop trying to defund Obamacare after having begged Republican state lawmakers to accept the law's Medicaid expansion. She has even suggested that the GOP should be open to tax increases as a compromise to pass a budget through Congress.

Still, Brewer is no LGBT ally either. Shortly after she assumed office, she signed a bill redefining "dependent" so that same-sex domestic partners of state employees could no longer receive benefits, arguing that "God has placed me in this powerful position as Arizona's governor" to make such decisions. She defended cutting the benefits in court, but not successfully.

UPDATE: In a letter explaining her veto, Brewer calls out Obama: "The concerns raised by the proponents of this bill are not unfounded. As a result of actions taken by the Obama Administration, as well as some federal and out-of-state courts, I am increasingly concerned about government's encroachment upon our religious freedoms."

UPDATE: In Ohio, two state lawmakers withdrew proposed legislation that mirrors the Arizona bill. "We feel that it is in the best interest of Ohioans that there be no further consideration of this legislation," State Rep Tim Derickson (R) said in a statement.

PROBABLY GOVERNOR JAN ALREADY THOUGHT SHE
WAS LIVING HER WORST POLITICAL NIGHTMARE

That, however, was yesterday. Today came this spine-chilling development:

FEBRUARY 26, 2014
MASS GAY MIGRATION AIMS TO MAKE ARIZONA MAJORITY GAY
POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ



PHOENIX (The Borowitz Report) -- Rejecting calls to boycott Arizona, a newly formed gay organization is mobilizing its members to move to the state by the millions in the hopes of transforming it into the nation's first majority gay state.

The group, called Americans for a Gay Arizona, has already received commitments from a million gay Americans to move to the state within the next two months, with a target of enlisting over six million gays to move there by the end of the year.

Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of the group, said that the influx of six million gays would be "more than enough" to insure that Arizona would be majority gay, but he acknowledged that he did not have an exact figure of how many gays currently reside there.

"We think it could be as many as a million," he said. "But if you add in conservative politicians, that number could go much higher."

According to one associate of Governor Jan Brewer, the plan to move six million gays to Arizona is shaping up to be the governor's worst nightmare.

"She's always been against immigration, but nothing like this," the associate said.

TOMORROW: An update on last night's other "profile
in courage," crackpot K Street lobbyist Jack Burkman

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From Arizona to K Street: Profiles in courage, 2014 right-wing-loon-style

"Like rats on a sinking ship"

@brahmresnik

by Ken

TO BE SERIOUS FOR A MOMENT,

because we're about to descend into the pit of American Cuckoo, maybe the most significant aspect of such recent developments as Arizona's passage of a "Right to Hate the Homos" bill and the coming of openly gay athletes to the NBA and the NFL is the response. In the case of Arizona, the spontaneous outpouring of outrage, not just from across the country but from within the state almost makes a person proud to be an American. And in the case of the latest "integration" of American professional sports, what's great to hear is how many people are asking why it should be a big deal that NBA veteran Jason Collins, having already gone public with his sexual orientation, was signed to a ten-day contract by the Brooklyn Nets, or that all-America University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam went public ahead of the upcoming NFL draft.

As I write, as you know, the clock is ticking on Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to make her momentous decision, whether to sign or veto the splendid piece of legislation sponsored by her state's equally splendid legislature authorizing Christians who jes' hate us them goddam homos to refuse to have anything to do with them, including doing any kind of business with them, on the ground that the Bible tells us so.

There doesn't seem to be much doubt that left to her own devices Governor Jan would sign the bill in a heartbeat, and maybe do a little dance in celebration. She's just a hatin' kinda gal. Unfortunately, she has found herself at the center of a shitstorm of panic coming not just from the predictable bleeding-heart-socialist Left but from her very own Rock-Ribbed Right. To quote the head on Zack Ford's ThinkProgress piece: "Conservative Lawmakers And Arizona Businesses Urge Governor To Veto Anti-Gay Bill."

The "lawmakers" in question include not just both of the state's U.S. senators, those flaming liberals Young Johnny McCranky and Jeff Flake and several of its U.S. representatives but a number of Arizona mayors and even a bunch of the state legislators who voted for this splendid piece of legislation. Many of those legislators are apprarently running to succeed Governor Jan (as if so stellar a public servant could be truly replaced!). State Sen. Steve Pierce, for one, professing concern with a possible "negative picture" of the state, now says, "I screwed up. I'm trying to make it right."

Of course it's nothing new for Arizona to stand proud as the Conscience of America's Hatin' Loons. How long, after all, did the state hold out against the federal holiday honoring that goddam troublemaker Martin Luther King Jr.? In the end, of course, Arizona businessmen saw an alarming share of the nation's business that once came to them going to other, less principled states.

February 25, 2014
ARIZONA CONFRONTING AWKWARD REALIZATION THAT GAY PEOPLE HAVE MONEY, BUY STUFF
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ



PHOENIX (The Borowitz Report) -- The state of Arizona found itself in the middle of a conundrum today as it awoke to the awkward realization that gay people have money and buy stuff.

Just days after the Arizona legislature passed a law that would enable businesses to discriminate against gays, it emerged that gays spend billions of dollars in Arizona each year -- an unexpected development that seemed to take many legislators by surprise.

Carol Foyler, a Tea Party Republican who supported the anti-gay law, said that the startling bombshell that gays play a role in the state's economy put her and her fellow lawmakers "in a tight spot."

"Quite frankly, we were blindsided by this," she said. "We had no idea that gays had money and bought things just like regular people do."

Acknowledging that her vote for the anti-gay law might have been calamitous for the state's economy, Ms. Foyler placed the blame for it squarely on the shoulders of one group: the gays themselves.

"How was I supposed to know what gay people do with their money, etc., when I don't personally know any gay people?" she asked. "I'm sorry, but it was up to the gays to tell us."

Indeed the Arizona business community has been a little quicker on the uptake this time around. ThinkProgress's Zack Ford reports:

The CEOs of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, Greater Phoenix Leadership and the Southern Arizona Leadership Council wrote to Brewer requesting a veto:

After analyzing the bill, we are very concerned about the effect it could have on Arizona's economy. As leaders in the business community, we cannot support measures that could expose our businesses to litigation, nor do we want to send a message that our state is anything but an open and attractive place for visitors and the top talent that will be the cornerstone of our continued economic growth.

If specific Arizona issues related to religious liberty are identified, we would stand ready to work with anyone to ensure that any solution addresses those problems while also ensuring that all individuals feel welcome in our state and that business is not hurt.

According to Kirstin Jarnagin, vice president of the Arizona Lodging and Tourism Assocation, people are already cancelling trips to Arizona because of the negative perception the bill has brought to the state. . . .

Oops! Why, George Takei is talking about leading a national boycott! Can the rest of Starfleet be far behind?


WHAT GOVERNOR JAN COULD DO . . .

Poor Governor Jan! All those people fussin' and hissin' at her to veto the damn bill, jes' 'cause those folks don't know their Bible, and how God and Jesus and everybody demands that the righteous hate them homos.

If she was really cagey, what Governor Jan would do is, yes, veto the damn bill -- but on the ground that it doesn't go far enough! Well-meant as this bill undoubtedly is, it leaves the state open to the charge of singling out the gays and the lesbos for hatin'. Whereas the point is that Arizona is just tryin' to preserve the rights of all good old-fashioned Bible hatin'.

So the governor sends the bill back and says she won't sign it till it's more, y'know, inclusive. Like the Jews. Doesn't the Bible to tell us to hate them damn Jews? Didn't they kill our Lord, and drink the blood of Christian children? And they've got those big-ass noses, and damn, they just smell bad. Why should righteous folk have to be, y'know, kowtowin' to the likes of them?

It seems to me like the perfect solution. All those people screechin' about gettin' the bill vetoed get what they want, and Arizona still gets to stand up proud for what it's righteous folk stand for.


MEANWHILE IN THE CUCKOO CORRIDORS OF
K STREET: STANDIN' UP AGAINST SPORTS HOMOS

Thanks to the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart for calling attention to this nuttiness: a Washington lobbyist who not only thinks that gays should be banned from the NFL but that Congress should pass a law doing so.

You're going to think that this report comes from The Onion, but no, I swear, it comes from The Hill:

Lobbyist drafts bill to ban gays from NFL

By Rebecca Shabad

Washington lobbyist Jack Burkman on Monday said he is preparing legislation that would ban gay athletes from joining the National Football League.

Burkman in a statement said he has garnered political support for the bill, though his statement didn’t mention any specific lawmakers who are behind it.

"We are losing our decency as a nation," Burkman said in a statement. "Imagine your son being forced to shower with a gay man. That’s a horrifying prospect for every mom in the country. What in the world has this nation come to?"

Burkman said he came up with the idea after college football star Michael Sam publicly revealed he is gay a few weeks ago. If drafted, Sam would be the first openly gay player in the NFL.

Jason Collins on Sunday became the first openly gay athlete to play for a major men's professional sports team when he suited up for the NBA's Brooklyn Nets against the Los Angeles Lakers.

A number of Democratic lawmakers voiced their support of Sam after he revealed his sexual orientation in an interview with ESPN, and first lady Michelle Obama hailed him as an "inspiration."

Burkman was not available to speak with The Hill but urged Congress to act in his statement.

"If the NFL has no morals and no values, then Congress must find values for it," Burkman said.

Burkman serves as founder and president of his own lobbying firm, Burkman Associates. He has also worked as of counsel at law firm Holland & Knight. In the 1990s, he served as counsel to then-Rep. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.).

In a statement to The Hill Tuesday, Holland & Knight said it "is proud of its support of the LGBT community and we condemn Jack Burkman's current efforts. Mr. Burkman's employment with Holland & Knight ended almost 12 years ago. He was a lawyer in our Washington office from October 1998 to May 2002."

Burkman's firm, JM Burkman & Associates, signed 70 new clients last year, the most of any K Street firm, a recent review by The Hill found. 

The four-lobbyist firm specializes in helping companies secure contracts with the federal government.

You'll note that our Jack's former associates are also running from him as fast as their legs will take them. This is also a good sign.

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Anti-Immigrant Mormons Set To Save Romney's Ass In Arizona Mañana

Predictably, Arizona's accidental and very tragic governor, Jan Brewer, endorsed the GOP Establishment candidate for her party's presidential nomination. That what's she's programmed to do so it would have only had been news if she had endorsed one of the other lunatics. But in a state where Mormons vote in enough of a lockstep bloc to have disproportionate power inside the state GOP, there was never any question about what Brewer would do-- regardless of the noisy, embarrassing kerfuffle over Romney campaign co-chair, Sheriff Babeu, and his immigrant boyfriend, Jose.

Nor should it be news to anyone that what the polarizing cloddish Brewer is best known for one thing: her hysterical anti-immigrant mania. She's led her state into a shameful anti-Hispanic kind of ethnic cleansing that is reminiscent of the pre-gas chamber Nazis. Two weeks ago we talked about the shame of Alabama's anti-immigrant policies. The difference is that Alabama doesn't have many Hispanics. Arizona does-- and always has... long before there were non-Hispanics, in fact. But the Republican Party there-- like in Alabama-- wants to drive them out of the state.

I've been quoting Joshua Holland's book, The 15 Biggest Lies About The Economy, a lot and he has a whole chapter (i.e., the debunking of a whole web of lies, about the GOP anti-immigrant myths). Let me just focus on a brief summary in honor of tomorrow's primary ion that state and Romney's assertion that Arizona's policy of ethnic cleansing should be a model for the whole country:

Reaction to the bill was swift. Within weeks of the law’s passage, two of Arizona’s largest cities, Flagstaff and Tucson, announced that they were suing to block the law. A boycott of Arizona goods and services was called. The Boston, Los Angeles, and Oakland city councils stopped doing business in the state, and, as of this writing, New York and Washington, D.C., were considering following suit. San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado, suspended all official travel to the Copper State. According to the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association, nineteen conferences were canceled just in the first week after the bill was signed.

According to an analysis by the Immigration Policy Center, “If significant numbers of immigrants and Latinos are actually persuaded to leave the state because of this new law, they will take their tax dollars, businesses, and purchasing power with them.”

The University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy estimates that the total economic output attributable to Arizona’s immigrant workers was $44 billion in 2004, which sustained roughly 400,000 full-time jobs. Furthermore, over 35,000 businesses in Arizona are Latino-owned and had sales and receipts of $4.3 billion and employed 39,363 people in 2002, the last year for which data is available. The Perryman Group estimates that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Arizona, the state would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs, even accounting for adequate market adjustment time.

Again, the federal government has exclusive domain over regulating immigration to the United States, so Arizona’s law is unlikely to withstand legal challenges. But if it does, what follows would be utterly predictable: the state not only will lose out on tourism and international business travel, but a huge share of its workforce, both legal and otherwise, will also seek less nasty climes. Arizona will face enormous litigation costs, and local police agencies will start to complain that they don’t have the resources to enforce other laws. Brand Arizona will continue to take a pummeling, companies will face a whole new set of hiring challenges, and the state’s business community will start to complain. Eventually, the very same lawmakers who pushed the new law will admit that it didn’t work out as they’d intended.

I say this with the confidence born of past experience. In 2007, Arizona passed another tough “enforcement only” immigration law, which mandated the use of an (unreliable) electronic verification system and subjected employers to the loss of their business licenses for hiring the wrong people. It turned out to be a disaster that might rank up there with the Edsel or New Coke in the pantheon of bone-headed ideas.

The state had a very low unemployment rate when the law was passed-- it was, at least in part, a “solution” to a problem that Arizona didn’t have. Unemployment was at 4.1 percent when the law went into effect in early 2008 and had been at 3.7 percent when a judge upheld the measure a year earlier. By the middle of 2008, lawmakers were scrambling to undo the shock they’d inflicted on the state, as up to 8 percent of the population-- according to one estimate-- decided to hightail it out of Arizona en masse. The state faced new labor shortages, as well as a loss in demand from all of those worker-consumers. Eventually, the law was amended, in part due to pressure from Arizona businesses.

The people of Arizona learned the hard way that immigrants not only supply labor, but also demand goods and services in turn. In addition, they learned that newer immigrant communities have a mix of people with different legal statuses all jumbled together, and that when there’s a widespread perception that politicians (and citizens) are attacking immigrants, it doesn’t much matter that some people differentiate between those who are “legal” and “illegal”-- Arizona lost plenty of citizens and lawful permanent residents with that drop in population.

A University of Arizona study concluded that economic output in Arizona would drop 8.2 percent annually if foreign-born workers left the state’s labor force. “Getting rid of these workers means we are deciding as a matter of policy to shrink our economy,” Judith Gans, an immigration scholar at the university’s Udall Center, told the Wall Street Journal. “They’re filling vital gaps in our labor force.”

Koch-Conservatism Is Predicated On Taking Away The Vote From As Many People As Possible Without Provoking A Revolution

I'm savoring every paragraph of Corey Robin's new book, The Reactionary Mind so I limit myself to no more than 5 pages a day. (Yesterday I had no electric power from noon 'til 9pm, so I cheated and read 2 whole chapters.) But two of the themes that have emerged from the book so far is that conservatism is a reaction against emancipation (the sharing of power) and that conservative parties are the parties of losers (literally-- people feeling loss).

Nothing so disturbs the idyll of inheritance as the sudden and often brutal replacement of one world with another... While conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society's lower casts and classes, they often are the left's best students.

...Where their predecessors in the old regime thought of inequality as a naturally occurring phenomenon, an inheritance passed on from generation to generation, the conservatives' encounter with revolution teaches them that the revolutionaries were right after all: inequality is a human creation. And if it can be uncreated by men and women, it can be recreated by men and women.

That is Koch-conservatism at its essence and that's why Koch-creatures like Scott Walker (R-WI), Rick Scott (R-FL), Rick Snyder (R-WI), Rick Perry (R-TX), John Kasich (R-OH) are so profoundly dangerous to American democracy. All came to power by mobilizing largely racist, right-wing faux populists and all immediately set about reversing the effects of emancipation on every front-- voting rights being one of the first tackled in each state. This week Scott Keyes tackled Koch's ALEC laws disenfranchising millions of American voters in time for next year's election. It is conservatively estimated that 5 million lower income and minority voters will be unable to vote next year because of restrictive GOP laws that reverse emancipation for likely Democratic voters. These new laws, he writes, could be enough, as we saw in Ari Berman's Rolling Stone essay last month “to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.” Keyes:

Thirty-one years after Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and father of the modern conservative movement, told a Dallas crowd that “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Republicans are making good on his call to making voting more difficult in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at the different ways in which states are make voting significantly more difficult.

WAR ON VOTING: Perhaps the most sweeping change in voting rights since the 2010 election is the proliferation of state laws requiring citizens to present photo identification in order to vote. First introduced in Indiana in 2008, new “photo ID” laws have the potential to disenfranchise 3.2 million voters, mostly poorer residents and minorities. This was plainly evident when a group of retired nuns in the Hoosier State were turned away from voting in the 2008 primary election because they lacked proper photo identification. Three years later, half a dozen new states have followed Indiana’s lead: Georgia, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Rather than each state independently concluding that they needed a photo ID law, model legislation was pushed to state lawmakers by the right-wing corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In South Carolina alone, a new study warns that “nearly 180,000 voters-- most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low-income voters-- will be disenfranchised as a result of this discriminatory bill.” Meanwhile, a 96-year-old Tennessee woman named Dorothy Cooper attempted to comply with her state’s new photo ID law this month, only to be denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage certificate. Cooper later told MSNBC that her experience now is worse than in the Jim Crow era. Unperturbed, some politicians like Herman Cain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have thrown their support behind a national photo ID law. The war on voting isn’t just restricted to new photo ID laws; five states-- Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia-- have reduced their early voting periods as well.

RESTRICTING REGISTRATION: The war on voting isn’t simply resigned to Election Day. Instead, a number of Republican-controlled states are making it more difficult to even get registered in the first place. Such restrictions generally come in three forms: new requirements for individuals attempting to register, onerous regulations on non-profit organizations that conduct voter registration drives, and restrictions on when people are permitted to register. In Kansas and Alabama, those wishing to register to vote must now provide proof of citizenship first. Other states like Florida and Texas have opted to make it significantly harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register people to vote. Project Vote said the new Florida law, which requires “complicated, onerous filings” including a mandate to turn in completed voter registration forms within 48 hours of completion, will “make it next to impossible” for nonprofit voting groups to continue their work. As a result, the League of Women Voters chose to suspend its voter registration drives in the Sunshine State. Michigan is currently considering a bill similar to Florida’s, but with just a 24-hour window to submit voter registration forms. In Maine, the Republican-controlled legislature has taken a different path, choosing to repeal the state’s 38-year-old law allowing citizens to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. The law worked remarkably well for decades, making Maine the top state in 2010 voter turnout without benefiting either particular party. Fortunately, the repeal of Election Day Registration is now subject to a citizen’s veto and will come up for a vote on Tuesday, Nov. 8.

PHANTOM MENACE OF FRAUD: Conservatives’ justification for the new restrictions on voting rights is that they are necessary to head off voter fraud. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus underscored this argument, claiming that non-profit voter organizations like ACORN submitted 400,000 fraudulent registrations in 2008. This zeal to restrict voting rights in the name of preventing fraud was also evident in Maine last month, where the state Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster drew up a list of 206 University of Maine students with out-of-state home addresses and accused them of voter fraud. The Republican Secretary of State subsequently took this list and sent threatening letters to the students, complete with a form to cancel their voter registration in Maine. In fact, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes in two new reports, electoral voter fraud is largely a myth. In a heralded paper titled “The Truth About Voter Fraud," the Brennan Center notes that “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” Indeed, most cases of voter fraud “can be traced to causes far more logical than fraud by voters,” including clerical or typographical errors, mismatched entries, and simple mistakes on either end. In Wisconsin, for instance, approximately 3 million votes were cast in 2004, of which just seven were ultimately deemed invalid-- all from felons who were unaware of their ineligibility. Comedian Stephen Colbert recently mocked the need for photo ID laws, noting that fraud occurs in “a jaw dropping 44 one-millionths of one percent” of votes.

Is the Obama administration finally going on a counter-offense. Forget the grand stuff-- like preservation of democracy and emancipation-- it is, after all, a matter of self-preservation. From the time of Hobbes, conservatives have been advocating for less political participation for the masses. And more than a few from the ranks of the masses-- like our current crop of losers, the teabaggers-- have been perfectly comfortable with that perspective. Of all Obama's "we can't wait" initiatives, this one should be thought of as "we'd better not wait."

The Obama re-election campaign has quietly opened a counteroffensive against Republican-backed changes to election laws that Democrats say will suppress votes for their candidates and limit their get-out-the-vote drives.

The effort, led by former White House counsel Robert Bauer, prompted the suspension of an Ohio law limiting early voting. Campaign officials produced educational materials to counter a Wisconsin law that requires voters to produce photo I.D.s-- but disallows those used by Wisconsin colleges.

By this spring, the Obama re-election campaign will mount what Mr. Bauer called an unprecedented "voter protection" effort, fielding thousands of volunteers in battleground states to help navigate new election laws, months earlier than past efforts.

"We will look at what the state has done, look for ways to counter it, through litigation sometimes, through administrative interpretation sometimes. But beyond that, you have to have a program that actually goes out and shows voters what they need to do," a senior Obama campaign official said.

Republicans see no precedent for a presidential re-election campaign to go this far to counter laws passed by state legislatures and signed by governors. "It's somewhat concerning that the president's own team is seeking to undermine laws that ensure only registered voters actually vote," said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

More than 30 states have changed voter laws since 2008, including seven that added requirements that voters show photo identification at their polling places. Republicans say limits on early voting are needed to cut the administrative costs of elections, and new I.D. requirements are necessary to defend polling places from fraud.

The L.A. Times ran a very similar story based on Rick Scott's blatant attempts to hold down African-American and student voting in Florida, a state Obama needs to win again if he's going to have any chance for a second term. The corrupt and extreme right Republican legislature has passed a series of laws to hold down voting. The Times reports that a dozen GOP legislatures passed these kinds of anti-democracy laws. Five were vetoed by Democratic governors but, besides Florida, the proto-fascist laws stand in Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

Early voting was reduced from two weeks to one week. Voting on the Sunday before election day was eliminated. College students face new hurdles if they want to vote away from home. And those who register new voters face the threat of fines for procedural errors, prompting the nonpartisan League of Women Voters to suspend voter registration drives and accuse the Legislature of "reverting to Jim Crow-like tactics."

What is happening in Florida is part of a national trend, as election law has become a fierce partisan battleground. In states where Republicans have taken majority control, they have tightened rules for registering new voters, reduced the time for casting ballots and required voters to show photo identification at the polls. The new restrictions were usually adopted on party-line votes and signed by Republican governors.

During Florida's legislative debate on the new law, a Republican state senator argued that it should not be easy or convenient to vote. Voting "is a hard-fought privilege. This is something people died for," said Sen. Michael Bennett of Bradenton, the chamber's president pro tempore. "Why should we make it easier?"

Democrats have denounced new restrictions as "voter suppression" laws intended to deter voting by students, the elderly, the poor, the disabled and minorities.

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," former President Clinton told a group of college students in July.

This week, House Judiciary Committee senior Members John Conyers (D-MI) and Jerry Nadler (D-NY) sent a letter to Committee Chair Lamar Smith (D-TX) on Republicans pushing through disenfranchisement bills on a state level. Conyers and Nadler make the case that these laws are unconstitutional and violate the letter and the spirit of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Help America Votes Act. This is what they asked Smith that the Committee take up:

· Provisions that limit voting by requiring the presentation of photo identification.

· Laws that exclude the most common forms of identification (e.g., student IDs and Social Security cards), yet offer no alternate identification procedures for eligible voters.

· Changes requiring proof of citizenship as a condition for voter registration.

· Limitations or outright elimination of early voting opportunities.

· Barriers to first time voters, such as the elimination of same day registration and limitations on voter mobilization efforts.

And last night Rachel Maddow and Raúl Grijalva explained the power grab by the Koched-up Arizona Republican Party by their move to destroy the independent commission charged by the citizens of the state with drawing legislative maps. Worth watching:



UPDATE: Even The Conservative Arizona Republic Is Condemning The GOP Power Grab

Usually a reliable mouthpiece for the Republican Party, the Arizona Republic's editorial board issued an unusually blunt condemnation of this week's unprecedented power grab by Brewerand the GOP supermajority in the Legislature.

Gov. Jan Brewer and Senate Republicans ran roughshod over the public on Tuesday... They trampled a process that voters approved in 2000 to take the job of redrawing the political map away from elected officials... If a commissioner is going to be removed, the process must meet at least minimal standards of fairness and due deliberation. Instead, this was a rush job of a few hours. And the GOP votes were lined up beforehand. Behind closed doors... The fact that Republicans disagreed with how the commission applied the various criteria for mapping ... does not fit the definition of gross misconduct... In a crowning affront to the public, Gov. Brewer is out of town on a book signing tour this week and had Secretary of State Ken Bennett issue the call for a special session. She didn't bother to come back when taking a historic blow against a voter-approved institution.

Arizona Republicans Working To Make The State Unattractive To Companies That Need Even A Minimally Educated Work Force

Arizona fressers: noted Nazi, J.T. Ready & state Senate Pres. Russell Pearce

A few weeks ago, alarmed Arizona business leaders pulled the Republican rug out from under Arizona's blatantly racist Senate President, Russell Pearce.

The state legislature's focus on illegal immigration is hurting the state, a group of 60 Arizona business leaders said Tuesday.

"We strongly believe it is unwise for the Legislature to pass any additional immigration legislation," said a letter to state Senate President Russell Pearce, signed by executives from around the state.

The letter said that immigration issues, including changing the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship, are best left to Congress.

The state's move to enact immigration legislation has hurt Arizona's economy and brand, the letter said.

Almost instantly, Pearce's 5 most recent racist immigration bills were defeated. Racism is something that Arizona Republican Party dearly loves, but they know where their bread gets buttered and when Business speaks, Republican hacks listen... and jump. Pearce went down fighting, of course: “The lack of political courage is the only impediment to step up pressure on illegal immigration." His goal is to make Latinos feel unwelcome in Arizona and to drive them out of the state. Businessmen have noticed that this is nothing short of economic suicide.

One of the bills would have required hospitals to report people who lack insurance and cannot demonstrate legal status. Another would require schools to report on enrollments of illegal immigrant students. The fifth would have made it a crime for illegal immigrants to drive in Arizona.

And speaking of business leaders, pressure on the lunatic fringe of the GOP, and education, Tucson Congressman Raúl Grijalva has been fighting to keep jobs in Arizona and to protect the state's fragile and deteriorating education system. Like the other powermad Republican governors attempting to wreck public education, Jan Brewer and her right-wing legislature has been undermining the state's education at every level. Grijalva sent me this article from the Arizona Daily Star yesterday:

The former chief executive of Intel Corp. told legislative and business leaders Tuesday Arizona won't be a real magnet for new business until it turns out more qualified high school and college graduates.

"The educational system in the United States and in Arizona in particular is not particularly attractive," Craig Barrett told the Arizona Commerce Authority. The situation is so poor, he said, that if Intel were looking for a site to build an entirely new operation, as opposed to expanding its $10 billion Arizona presence, Arizona would not even be on the list of Top 10 choices.

He was not alone in his comments.

"The education system here is very weak," said Doug Pruitt, chief executive of Sundt Construction. And Judy Wood, who runs Contact One, a small call center, said even her firm, which does not need college graduates, is having trouble finding Arizona high school graduates who can properly compose a sentence.

Their audience included Gov. Jan Brewer, who co-chairs the authority and is proposing to cut state aid for universities by $170 million, or about another 20 percent.

Pearce has forced through a budget that cuts another quarter billion dollars from K-12 education, which fits his short-term vision of targeting Latinos but leaves Arizona vulnerable to further economic collapse in the future. Of course, even in the short run, Brewer's and Pearce's education cutbacks are an unmitigated disaster for Arizona.

Several hundred jobs could be cut as the University of Arizona struggles to manage deep budget cuts proposed by state leaders.

This comes on top of more than 600 jobs eliminated since 2009 as the state cut 25 percent of its appropriation to the UA.

Gov. Jan Brewer wants the UA to take a $67 million state budget cut next year.

The Arizona Board of Regents ordered the UA to absorb $39 million of that in reduced spending. The UA plans to make up the rest by raising tuition and spending reserves.

If Pearce, Brewer and the Arizona Republican Party share a vision to stop growth, it looks like they've found the way to do it. Meanwhile, this morning I got an e-mail from Bill Moran, who is directing an effort to mount a recall against Brewer based largely on her anti-education jihad.

Arizona university students are getting the shaft along with university faculty and staff.

They are being asked to bear the brunt of drastic cuts to the state’s budget initially proposed by Governor Jan Brewer, and subject to further increases under a recent proposal by the state Senate.

The Governor appears to be exploiting the larger cuts proposed by the Senate to prop up support for her cuts as a "reasonable" plan. "What’s "reasonable" about:

* Tuition increasing up to $9,000 a year for in-state students and up to $21,807 a year for out-of-state undergraduates – with even high tuition for graduate students?

* Eliminating the state’s contribution to the Arizona Financial Aid Trust, a vital financial aid program that students will need to rely on more than ever?

* The likelihood of larger class sizes, reduced programs and faculty lay-offs that will almost certainly diminish the quality of the education that students will now be paying premium prices for?

* Increased numbers of students unable to complete their degree in 4 years.

* Quality Educators leaving the state to seek employment in a more "education-friendly" state. (Previous budget cuts at already have resulted in layoffs, mandatory furloughs, early retirement incentives, streamlined majors and discontinued programs.)?

* Even greater challenges competing for jobs with the real or perceived devaluation of an Arizona university degree?

DON’T BE FOOLED BY GOVERNOR BREWER'S SPIN MACHINE!

Gov. Brewer’s spin machine is showcasing her proposed cuts to state university funding as the "better alternative" to the Senate proposal when, in fact, it is nothing more than the "lesser of two evils." Neither proposal is good for Arizona’s university students, faculty, staff or academic reputation!

RECKLESS TRACK RECORD THAT SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

Over last 2 years, on Gov. Brewer’s watch, higher education cuts have totaled $200 million which the Governor has signed into law. During the last 5 years, tuition at the state's public universities has risen a whopping 73.3% at U of A, 48.1% at ASU and 55.1% at NAU. Two+ yearsof these hikes have been Governor Brewer's watch.

Rallies, protests and letters to state legislators are unlikely to change anything!

BUT THERE IS A GENUINE ANSWER . . .ONE WITH "REAL TEETH."

Shareholders in a business exercise their right to vote out an ineffective and irresponsible leader. If you are a registered Arizona voter (or would like to register to vote online right now by clicking here!)

– You can do the same by helping us FIRE Gov. Jan Brewer!

She got this ball rolling. She signed all the previous budget cuts resulting in the drastic tuition hikes at our state universities over the last three years. She refuses to hold down tuition by cutting non-essential programs that do not affect Higher Education, or to consider raising revenues by supporting a sales tax on luxury services such as spa treatments or country club memberships.

She prefers proposals that take from students, the sick and the needy. Some feel this is merely because she does not feel they have the wherewithal do anything about it!

YOU CAN HELP US "FIRE" GOV. JAN BREWER BY SUPPORTING OUR RECALL!

Students, faculty and staff who are registered Arizona voters can sign our official petition to RECALL Gov. Jan Brewer. If we gather enough signatures by the legal deadline of May 28, 2011, the voters will have an opportunity to remove her from office through the election process just as they voted her in!

Help us send the strongest message possible, one with real teeth, to the elected officials and policy makers who are dictating Arizona’s future. By successfully recalling Gov. Brewer, we are giving notice that who we elect, we can un-elect. We are taking back lost ground.

SUPPORT OUR EFFORT BY VOLUNTEERING TO CIRCULATE RECALL PETITIONS, SPREADING THE WORD ONLINE AND DONATING WHAT YOU CAN!

Even if you are not an Arizona registered voter, you can help by volunteering to circulate our recall petitions, help to take our effort viral by spreading the word through online social networking and by helping us to expand our effort with a small donation of $20, $15 or even just $10. (If you can do more, that would be great!).

CLICK HERE TO DONATE! | CLICK HERE TO SIGN PETITION!

Students made history by stopping a war and changing the world just a generation ago. We believe you can help us change the world again. Unlike Gov. Brewer, we do not underestimate what you are capable of! Please support our effort in every way that you can. The world will take notice. They will know you did it!

Help us gather 100,000 recall petition signatures from Arizona’s university campuses today!

And, be sure to visit our website at www.recallgovernorbrewer.com to see how else you can support our effort!

What Will These Fan Favorites Be in Their Next Lives?

Leading off our procession is our new House speaker. Has that skin tone ever existed anywhere in nature?

by Noah

I’ve always been interested in the Hindu concept of karma. Having been brought up by severely Christian parents with their quaint notion that God punishes, the idea of karmic payback has a special place in what passes for my soul. So this morning, for some reason that shrinks get paid to uncover for a hefty fee but I can uncover for zippo, I started to muse on what might be the fate of certain cretins who walk among us and inhabit our TVs. Not that I’m judgmental or anything, but herewith I give you my version of what marma might provide for the future lives of some of the creatures who soil our existence on this planet.

1. Incoming House Speaker John Bo(eh)ner. He will be an orange-patent-leather ladies' handbag and matching shoes. He will live in a city that lacks one of those anti-dog-poop-on-the-sidewalk laws.

2. Rush Limbaugh. A highly over-inflated, bulging rear tire on a 1962 “Unsafe at Any Speed” Corvair speeding down the highway on a very hot summer day.

3. Michelle Malkin. The driver of the Corvair in (2).

4. Incoming Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. A starving, impoverished black man in the rural south of the 1930s, being chased through a Mississippi swamp by Trent Lott’s relatives and a pack of hounds.

5. Rahm Emanuel. He’ll get his wish to be Mayor of Chicago, but the year of his election will be 1922 and the city will be a living hell run by Al Capone, and there will be no Eliot Ness. Be careful what you wish for Rahm. Welcome to Chicago politics, Roaring 20’s style, Rahm.

6. Former Vice President Dick Cheney. He will be Darth Vader, with a twist. His voice will be high and squeaky and his ability to use the force will leave him at the darndest times. The sound he hears more than any other will be laughter. Much of the laughter will be directed at him, but, much of the laughter will also be stark evidence of the happiness of the general population. Both things will make him completely mad and utterly miserable.

7. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. A piñata at a remote desert Mexican birthday party.

8. Ann “Coultergeist” Coulter. She will be a particularly tough piece of stale beef jerky in the mouth of a tobacco-spitting cowboy in Wyoming. The cowboy will get nowhere with his attempts to gnaw on the jerky and will toss it to the ground in frustration. That night, two rabid foaming at the mouth raccoons will come along and indulge in an epic tug of war.

9. Cyclist Lance Armstrong. A bicycle seat in the Tour de France.

10. Montana Sen. Max Baucus. A beat-up attaché case used to carry germ and drug encrusted cash in drug deals by people who will end up as K Street lobbyists.

11. Sean Hannity. A nationally known white supremacist suddenly dropped into the middle of the 1968 Detroit riots.

12. Politico. Toilet paper in bin Laden’s cave.

13. Incoming Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Rush Limbaugh’s cigar.

14. Incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa. A ten-year-old boy’s plastic Nazi soldier on the sidewalk about to meet the magnifying-glass death ray.

15. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A Fire hydrant in a future city where 8 million humans have disappeared into thin air, only to be replaced by 8 million dogs.

16. Bristol Palin. A dime-a-dance girl in an Alaskan dance hall during the 19th Century Alaskan Gold Rush. Don’t worry Bristol, those sloppy-drunk, reeking prospectors can’t dance either but that’s not what they’re really interested in anyway.

17. Incoming Washington State Rep. Hans Zeiger. A Girl Scout-in-training.

18. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. A little girl’s favorite dolly, complete with a doll-size set of a hundred dresses, bikinis, lingerie, spike heels, and evening wear. Oh wait, he’d like that!

19. The entire U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Pregnant women chained to a work bench making 15 cents per day making cheap sneakers and day-glo shower slippers in a Southeast Asian factory. Same goes for everyone at Goldman-Sachs.

20. Osama bin Laden. Lab rat for a scientist who's looking for a cancer cure.

21. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Luau pig.

22. Glenn Beck. One of those big fat bright yellow very dented bumper guards at a very busy toll plaza on America’s number one drunk driver highway.

23. Goldman Sachs Chairman-CEO Lloyd Blankfein. A Dumpster-diving homeless man who learns the value of humility and integrity but gets the crap kicked out of him by a pack of drunken, coked-out Wharton Business School grads on a near-daily basis.

24. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. A slave owned by a very sadistic plantation owner in a place that is remarkably like South Carolina in 1820. They will break him, badly.

25. Sarah Palin. one of those jack-in-the-box heads on a Slinky thingie. Lots of chips in the paint.

26. George Dubya Bush. An abandoned three-year-old boy in Crawford, TX, whose daddy was last seen disappearing over a hill with the family’s prized ewe, never to be seen again. Little Georgie will now have to fend for himself if he’s to ever amount to anything.

27. Former BP CEO Tony Hayward. A brown pelican.

28. Brett Favre. A model for airport porno-scanners.

29. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell.

#

The GOP Isn’t Interested In Helping The Economy As Long As A Democrat Is In The White House

The title above is a direct quote from yesterday's Paul Krugman column in the NY Times. It's quite extraordinary when you think about it. Steve Benen had something similar to say last week but yesterday, one of the most distinguished economic thinkers in the world, a columnist for the most important newspaper in the world just leveled a charge akin to treason against a major political party. In fact, he did it several times in the column, just in case anyone is skimming and missed it once.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation-- cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.

Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality. Thus on the same day that Mr. Simpson rejoiced in the prospect of chaos, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, appealed for help in confronting mass unemployment. He asked for “a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits.”

My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too? After all, the G.O.P. isn’t interested in helping the economy as long as a Democrat is in the White House. Indeed, far from being willing to help Mr. Bernanke’s efforts, Republicans are trying to bully the Fed itself into giving up completely on trying to reduce unemployment.

And on matters fiscal, the G.O.P. program is to do almost exactly the opposite of what Mr. Bernanke called for. On one side, Republicans oppose just about everything that might reduce structural deficits: they demand that the Bush tax cuts be made permanent while demagoguing efforts to limit the rise in Medicare costs, which are essential to any attempts to get the budget under control. On the other, the G.O.P. opposes anything that might help sustain demand in a depressed economy-- even aid to small businesses, which the party claims to love.

Right now, in particular, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits-- an action that will both cause immense hardship and drain purchasing power from an already sputtering economy. But there’s no point appealing to the better angels of their nature; America just doesn’t work that way anymore.

And opposition for the sake of opposition isn’t limited to economic policy. Politics, they used to tell us, stops at the water’s edge-- but that was then.

These days, national security experts are tearing their hair out over the decision of Senate Republicans to block a desperately needed new strategic arms treaty. And everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it’s an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it.

How does this end? Mr. Obama is still talking about bipartisan outreach, and maybe if he caves in sufficiently he can avoid a federal shutdown this spring. But any respite would be only temporary; again, the G.O.P. is just not interested in helping a Democrat govern.

My sense is that most Americans still don’t understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what’s necessary. But that was another country.

Krugman's immediate concern is the "mainstream" Republican Obama appointed to the Deficit Commission, Alan Simpson, who seems to take great pleasure in public displays of derangement. His latest was a shrill cry for "the blood bath in April... When debt limit time comes." Krugman points out that the Republican strategy is to "probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they’ve done it before. Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America’s role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson “can’t wait.” And he’s what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican."

The question for the rest of us is why is Obama appointing saboteurs like Alan Simpson? A Democratic Member of Congress-- until recently one of Obama's most fervent and public defenders, someone who is so disillusioned with him that he now says he'll vote for him in 2012 as the lesser of two evils-- told me last week that Obama isn't just willing to do the bidding of the ruling elite on Social Security, but that he wants to. Obama sees himself leading a great conservative coalition of the center, between Republican-dominated reactionaries and incoherent teabaggers on the one hand and progressives of his own party on the other hand.

Howard Dean, Alan Grayson and Dennis Kucinich have all said they will not primary Obama. Will Bernie Sanders? In that case he'll continue moving inexorably to the right. That isn't just a label. It will mean more of everything we hated about the Bush Regime-- from the national security state to the dismantling of the American social contract. Alan Simpson wants blood. He's liable to get it when ordinary Americans get pushed too far over the edge to not react. Arizona's Republican death panels are for real. And what they come down to is now standard GOP political philosophy-- better to condemn the poor to death than ask the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes.

Instead of trying to save the lives of these people, who had been told that they had a chance to spend a few more years with their families, the Arizona legislature has chosen to take away their hope in order to save an estimated $4.5 million.

Facing a projected $1.5 billion budget deficit, the state of Arizona has decided to make poor people pay with their lives instead of making rich people pay with their treasure.

This didn't have to happen. In a special election in January 2010, the people of Oregon (a state with a comparable average income as Arizona) decided to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations instead of cutting essential services. Despite an all-out effort to convince voters that taxing the rich would hurt the poor, voters approved Measures 66 and 67, raising tax rates on those most able to pay and allocating the money to preserve state services.

Our economy for the past decade or more has been built on lies. Superfueled by greed and so-called "innovation" in the financial sector, it finally careened off the road and slammed head-on into the cement wall of reality. Instead of taxing the people who caused and profited from this situation, our political system has bailed them out, buried their crimes and passed the costs onto the most vulnerable-- people like the 98 poor men and women who were told their lives might be saved, only to have that hope taken away.

I don't think anyone's going to shoot anyone because a TSA agent gropes their junk... but what happens when members of your family as condemned to die? How many Arizonans would love to take a potshot at Jan Brewer or Russell Pearce about now?

We do remember who made the, um, amazing Jan Brewer governor of Arizona, don't we?

Is this some of that Hope 'n' Change we were proffered? Oh wait, no, it's Hope 'n' Crosby -- even less funny. Never mind.

by Ken

Just to be clear, for the benefit of readers who may not be totally up to date on Howie's ongoing coverage of the outer limits of loony-tune candidates in this election cycle, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is hardly the loopiest of them, bearing in mind just how high the bar for looopiness has been set -- and keeps being raised. One interesting difference, though, is that "Gov." in front of her name. Yessir, ladies and gents, our Jan is actually the sitting governor of one of the states of our United States of America!

At least as of this moment we can offer the mitigating qualification that she wasn't elected governor. It remains to be seen whether this will still be sayable come November 3.

In the more narrowly targeted note of shock regarding our Jan's recent debate "performance" I added to Howie's broader-themed pommeling of the accidental governor, I focused on all that dead air she produced, just standing there saying nothing -- most amazingly in her opening statement. This genuinely blew my mind, in a political season that's shaping up to be our craziest ever, and consequently I'm doing my darnedest to render my mind unblowable. The thing is, how do you go into a high-stakes political debate not knowing what the heck you're going to say in your opening statement?

I still don't get that. But as I said then, "It's not clear that Arizona voters will exact any price for the fact that their incumbent governor apparently has nothing to say either about the job she's done or the job she hopes to do if elected."

Our Jan did get elected secretary of state, though, and as I also wrote:

The attention that has been focused on the Arizona governor's race thanks mostly to Governor Brewer's debate performance has belatedly set me to thinking more about how exactly she came to be governor. Which takes me back to the, um, curious way President-elect Obama went about filling the high-level positions in his administration. I think we should talk about that one of these days.

I don't mean to make a big thing of this. I just want to make sure there's some note on the record somewhere concerning one of the decided unusualnesses of the formative phase of the Obama administration, namely the convulsions caused by the number of high-ranking Democrats plucked out of office in the assembling of the cabinet.

Of course to some extent this is to be expected when the out-of-power party retakes the White House. After all, aren't its governors and U.S. senators among its foremost talent banks? Still, nobody that I can recall could recall such a shock to a party's power structure.

The talk at the time, I'm sure we all recall was, of Abraham Lincoln's "team of rivals" -- all those onetime Republican rivals brought into the Lincoln administration and forced to work with one another. The people who most pointedly rejected the analogy were the Lincoln scholars, and sure enough, it has become increasingly clear that those folks were brought into the government to eliminate any potential outside power bases.

To focus for a moment just on two snatched-away governors, while neither Arizona's Janet Napolitano nor Kansas's Kathleen Sebelius is DWT's kind of Democrat, in their home states they were prime movers in revived state parties that were offering electorally serious alternatives to the increasingly whacked-out Republicans. And I have to say, my progressive friends in Arizona had a lot of respect for their Democratic governor -- and once it became clear that Napolitano was being considered seriously for a cabinet job, they had a great deal of dread at what would happen once she was gone. Sure enough, the Arizona Democratic Party has virtually collapsed, and the Kansas one is in a mess. Hey, it's a good thing that one of the first things that political mastermind Master Rahm Emanuel did when he got his hands on the controls was to dismantle Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

Someday we might want to run down the individual cases to appreciate the depth and breadth of the damage done to, or at least the inherent structural weakness of, the Democratic Party in states where high-level officeholders were suddenly out of the picture, which extended even to the new president's and vice president's own states. And like so many of those other Obama appointees, they have precious little to show for their time in the executive branch.

In Napolitano's case, whether or not it accords with her own views on immigration (the feeling of the people who knew her record back home is that it doesn't), she has presided over an immigration policy worse than the Bush regime's, apparently built around the common administration delusion that pandering to Republican crackpots and sociopaths will somehow soften up, or prevent the hardening of, opposition to meaningful immigration reform. As with most everything else this adminstration has touched, the reality has been pretty much the exact opposite.

And Sebelius, as HHS secretary serving in the job that for its intended designee, Tom Daschle, apparently was going to be a position of real power, doesn't seem to have had much to contributed except standing firm during the health care "debate" to insist, any time anyone dared to mention any kind of single-payer insurance system, no way, no how.

That's quite a record: exposing if not actually creating chaos and rot in state Democratic parties while rendering the precious new executive appointees useless if not worse. (One shining exception: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a corporate shill who may actually be more ineffectual than his Bush regime predecessors. I'm sure Master Rahm misses him in the Senate, where he had the potential to develop into another Lieberman or Ben Nelson, but the payoff at Interior has been spectacular, at least as measured by the standard of corporate whoredom and thuggery.

(Even now, with the prospect of Master Rahm returning to Chicago to run for mayor, the accounts I'm hearing suggest that Jim Messina has developed himself into Rahm by Any Other Name. More importantly, I've yet to see any evidence that anything the Master has done in any way conflicts with the wishes of the president he serves.)

Since in the Rahm universe Arizona is apparently conceded to Republicans, in the way that the Great Powers in colonial days conceded spheres of influence to rival powers in order to protect their own, Arizona Democrats have been left to fend for themselves. Well, they certainly wouldn't want the only kind of help Master Rahm knows how to provide in the exercise of party-building. But we shouldn't forget that the decision to make Jan Brewer governor of Arizona was made by the Obama brain trust.

#

My old pal Bob Reich probably wasn't much impressed with AZ Gov. Jan Brewer's debate, er, "performance"

Will Arizona voters hold it against their accidental governor that in her debate

opening

statement she had literally nothing to say?

by Ken

I'm not sure whether I've told this story here, but when I told it to Howie not long ago, he didn't seem to remember, and it's pertinent to an evaluation of Governor Brewer's debate, er, performance.

In Lettermanesque terms, I guess this would be my "Brush With Greatness." As a college freshman I made a limited round of "student activities" which included a drop-in on the debating society. That seemed up my alley, since I was (a) politically immersed and (b) as argumentative as the next guy. (The next guy would probably say, "More, oh more.") Having no experience of formal debate, I just assumed you got to go head-to-head with other loudmouths on subjects dear to your heart, and just somehow somebody kept score. Wrong!

I had no idea that in any given year every debater in the country (a) was debating the same topic, and (b) was debating both sides of the topic. As it happened, the topic that year related to the expansive definition of civil liberties wrought by the Warren Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren himself was still on the Court at the time, with three years to go till he submitted his retirement to President Lyndon Johnson, in an attempt to guard against having his replacement chosen by likely Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. It wasn't Warren's fault that the plan went haywire when Johnson tried to promote Associate Justice Abe Fortas to the chief's seat, eventually leaving two Court vacancies for (sure enough) President Nixon to fill.

The topic, which as I recall is always in the form of a resolution, was something like: "Resolved that the Commie-dominated Supreme Court's coddling of criminals has gone too far." Okay, that may not have been the exact wording, but that's sure how I heard it. And I would have had no trouble building up a good head of argumentative steam on the topic, as long as I would have been arguing against it. The idea that I would spend half my time as a debater, and more important as a debate researcher (we'll come back to this sticky point), arguing in favor of the proposition can fairly be said to have boggled my mind. What kind of sophistry was this?

I suppose it's great training for lawyers, who presumably have to be prepared to argue either side of most any proposition. I don't know, I suppose it somehow expands one's capacity to see all sides of an issue, having to argue both sides of any proposition. But heck, with a proposition like this, screw that! The Warren Court view of civil liberties inspired my political consciousness, and still does.

Now here's where it gets interesting: Given my total lack of experience of formal debating, I was assigned to begin with to the affirmative, for the simple reason that the affirmative debater opened the debate, meaning that his first argument could be wholly prepared, leaving only the second argument to be crafted according to what had been said to that point in the actual debate. And so, for the short time I stayed with the program, I was on the attack against the outrages of "Red" Warren and his fellow Court bolshies.

It may be that Bob Reich had less to do with this story than I made out at the top of this post, and I may have implied a somewhat more intimate relationship than the facts bear out. (I think "lying" would be a somewhat hysterical overreaction to what may constitute a tiny bit of exaggeration, or overstatement.) Where he comes into it is this.

At that time, in addition to being president of student government and one of the best-known people on campus, Bob was the guiding light of our debate society, or club, or whatever it was called. And to the extent that I had dealings with him, which could have been as extensive as my continued participation would have warranted, he simply couldn't have been more impressive. He was maybe the smartest person I'd ever met, and one of the hardest-working, and one of the least self-absorbed -- he seemed prepared to devote as much time (out of a schedule that must have been impossibly filled with extracurricular activities on top of his actual studies) as was called for to any fledgling debater who was prepared to roll up his sleeves and contribute to the endless grinding research of the year's topic which is essential to the well-being of any serious debate team.

By the time my assigned partner and I had two debates under our belt (one won, one lost), I'd had enough. Enough of the impassioned arguing of a position I considered untenable, enough of the unbearable tension of the debate experience itself, and enough of the exhortations to pitch in and do my share of that mind-numbing research for new arguments and citations for the team to use in all our debates. I hadn't bargained for that, and had no interest in it. Besides, I had my hands full squeezing out enough time to devote to avoiding doing classwork. (I turned out to be approximately as unindustrious a student in college as I had been in high school. Looking back, I'm kind of sorry about this. Alas, this is one of the infinite aspects of life for which there are no do-overs.)

So if you were expecting some dirt, or at least naughty confidences, regarding Bob Reich, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm sorry I wound up having so little contact with him. but on the basis of even that limited exposure, I might have guessed that this was a fellow who not only was going places but deserved to.

So I'm telling you that I can almost imagine Bob's response to Governor Brewer's flabbergasting performance in that lone debate she's allowing herself to participate in this election campaign for a first elected term as Arizona governor, a performance that Howie wrote about yesterday with such deserved disdain -- you know, the debate her staff explained she only participated in because she had to in order to score that $1.7 million in public campaign financing. And oh yes, the debate in which she spent an inordinate amount of time trying unsuccessfully to think of something to say.

The detail that really grabbed my attention in the accounts I read of the debate was that the governor's verbal participation first ground to a disastrous halt during her opening statement. WTF? During her opening statement? Based on my extensive experience of formal debate, all I could think of was: How the heck do you not know what you're going to say in your opening statement?

To be fair, I didn't bother to find out whether she was speaking first or second, and if she was speaking second, then there is at least some issue of incorporating what your opponent has said. Still, even in that case the basic thrust of the opening statement can surely be basically prescripted. And there was the accidental governor -- elevated to the job by line of succession as Arizona's secretary of state when Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano was tapped for the Homeland Security secretaryship in the Obama administration -- sucking air while the cameras rolled.

This by me is a lot more than the "gaffe" it's been widely described as being. Oh, I suppose it is a gaffe, which can be a really bad thing in a political culture that places such a high premium on gaffes. However, it's not clear that Arizona voters will exact any price for the fact that their incumbent governor apparently has nothing to say either about the job she's done or the job she hopes to do if elected. And it's not as if she had to prepare both sides of the issues, or indeed do any of the research herself. She just had to make some kind of case for her election.

Sometimes silence tells you all you need to know.


FURTHER THOUGHTS ON HOW THE UNFORTUNATE
JAN BREWER CAME TO BE GOVERNOR OF ARIZONA

The attention that has been focused on the Arizona governor's race thanks mostly to Governor Brewer's debate performance has belatedly set me to thinking more about how exactly she came to be governor. Which takes me back to the, um, curious way President-elect Obama went about filling the high-level positions in his administration. I think we should talk about that one of these days.

#

Maybe Jan Brewer Sounded Like A Lunatic During Her Debate Because It Runs In The Blood

Digby hipped me to the uncanny resemblance between so many Arizona GOP women and Tim Burton's horrific vision of mankind's enemies

You may have read that Arizona's accidental governor, dingbat Jan Brewer, has made a firm decision. She will not, under any circumstances, participate in another debate between now and the November election. If you don't understand why-- or if you want more of a specific answer than "Republicans don't have anything to offer that goes over well with the general public"-- take a look at the segment Rachel Maddow did the other day; it's fairly self-explanatory:



In fact, the only reason Brewer stumbled into-- let alone through-- the first catastrophic debate was because, according to her campaign, she wouldn't have qualified for the more than $1.7 million in public campaign funding if she didn't debate at least once. Instead, for the remainder of the Inferno State's campaign, she will just speak directly to fellow racists, irrational loons and bigots via Hate Talk Radio and the Republican Party's Fox News.

Brewer said she has been in elective office for 28 years, and Goddard has held office for nearly that long. "I think it's pretty defined what he stands for and what I stand for."

Anyway, Brewer said, she believes the debates help Goddard more than they benefit her.

"Why would I want to give Terry a chance to redefine himself?" she said.

Brewer conceded that her performance in Wednesday's debate, and her refusal to answer a question from reporters afterward, was not well-handled. That includes an opening statement when she lost her train of thought and went silent, and walking away after the event rather than answering questions about her prior statements about headless bodies in the desert.

Brewer blamed part of her post-debate activities on her gaffe in her opening statement. The governor also said she presumed reporters would want to talk to her about some of the issues raised during the hour-long, televised debate.

"All you guys were doing and talking were beheadings, beheadings, beheadings," the governor said. "That is something that has stuck with you all for so long, and I just felt we needed to move on."

Some people who watched the video of Brewer self-destructing before, during and after the debate think it may be because she had Ronald on her mind. No, not Ronald Reagan, Ronald Brewer, her criminally insane son. In fact, she could be feeling guilt pangs for allowing vital services to the mentally ill fall apart on the alter of the budget cuts she was trying to brag about during one of her brain freezes. Or maybe she was feeling distracted and guilty about something else:

Ronald Brewer, 46, is not just mentally ill. He was deemed criminally insane in 1990, following a July 1989 arrest and subsequent indictment for the sexual assault and kidnapping of a Phoenix woman. According to a Phoenix Police Department report dated July 29, 1989, Brewer, then an unemployed 25-year-old, forced his way into a woman's apartment on West Indian School Road and threatened to hurt her "real bad" if she didn't engage in sexual acts, including performing fellatio.

According to a police interview with the victim, the entire ordeal lasted "approximately 20 minutes. During the assault, she feared for her life and thought the suspect was going to kill her if she did not cooperate."  

Those details are not available for public inspection at county Superior Court-- even though in a typical criminal case, they probably would be. On January 9, 2009, Superior Court Judge Pendleton Gaines sealed the entire case file at the request of Ronald Brewer's attorney.

On December 1, 2008, President-Elect Barack Obama nominated then-Governor Janet Napolitano to be the head of Homeland Security. Her successor? Secretary of State Jan Brewer. Brewer assumed office as governor on January 21.

The timing is curious.

This marked the first time that Ronald Brewer's entire file was sealed. Previously, his mental-health files were sealed, which is typical. Criminal cases are rarely sealed, and then, only parts of such a case would usually be kept from the public.

I wonder if he votes.


UPDATE: Very Iffy

Today, after making a monkey out of herself in full public view, Brewer has pulled back from her beheadings mania: "That was an error, if I said that," she said, flatly... very flatly. Welcome to Jan Brewer's dark, dark world! If I thought she would make Joel-Peter Witkin the official state artiste I might consider lending her some support. But, although he certainly captures the little that's in her head, I suspect he's not her, pardon the expression, taste. She strikes me as a more... classical gal.