Prescott mural blow-up just the latest in string of racist embarrassments for Arizona

A month ago Arizona and the nation were in a furor about SB 1070, the new immigration bill which is written in a way that pretty much forces the police to question anyone Hispanic because of section 2, paragraph H which gives any local bigot the right to sue them in a court of law if they are not enforcing the law to the satisfaction of said local bigot.

So is our image getting better in the past month? Well, no.

The latest controversy involves a mural that was painted by a group of local artists known as the 'mural mice' under the direction of artist R.E. Wall at a school in Prescott. The kids in the mural were based on actual photos of kids in the school, and depicted two white kids, a black kid and the largest picture, in the center of the mural was of an Hispanic youngster. After the mural was completed, school principal Jeff Lane apparently caved to local pressure exerted by a local talk show host and city council President Steve Blair and ordered Wall to whiten the skin tone of the both the African-American kid and the Hispanic kid in the middle of the mural.

Subsequently it came out that even as the artists were painting the mural they were peppered with racial insults including the 'n' word and 's' word from passing motorists. Welcome to Arizona, 2010.

What's worse is that these stories are now coming out of Arizona with depressing regularity. There has been a new one every week it seems, courtesy mainly of our elected leaders, who apparently have figured out that by turning two thirds of the population against the other third they have a way to win an election.

Not long after signing the immigration bill, Governor Brewer also signed a bill abolishing ethnic studies programs in Arizona (that was originally written to kill Hispanic studies programs in Tucson but it will also impact the Native American studies programs at some of our northern Arizona colleges.)

Not to be outdone, School Superintendent Tom Horne (who is running for A.G.) ordered that state schools either fire or reassign any English teacher who has a foreign accent. There is no count yet on how many teachers have lost their jobs because of Horne's new rule, though in order to be teaching in an Arizona public school they already must prove they are legally authorized to work so there is no way that Horne's pronouncement can be couched as having anything to do with undocumented workers. It's that he's picking on even legal immigrants, plain and simple.

Not long after that there was the murder of Juan Daniel Varela, an hispanic man from Phoenix whose white neighbor came over to his house and shouted racial insults in Varela's face until Varela had had enough and allegedly tried to kick the man. The neighbor, Gary Thomas Kelley, was waiting for that moment and pulled out a 44 magnum and shot the unarmed Varela to death at close range. Kelley is claiming he fired in 'self-defense.'

On top of all of this, as I wrote exactly one month ago, Sheriff Arpaio is openly consorting and on a first name basis with neo-nazis. Well, what can you say about Joe? He says it's an 'honor' to be compared to the KKK and still gets re-elected. So what if he is on a first name basis with blackshirts who openly threaten Mexicans, Jews and other people and give Hitler salutes at rallies? In the words of M.C. Hammer, I think Arpaio believes that he's so electorally invincible that he can do anything and anyone who doesn't like it 'can't touch this.'

Are we TRYING to win the 'most bigoted state in the nation' award? It sure does feel like it.

UPDATE: 1) After taking heat on this the school board rehired the artist back to restore the mural to its original state, and 2) the Republican corporations commissioners have gotten into the act. Commissioner Steve Pierce suggested that because of boycotts, Arizona cut off the flow of electricity to California (apparently unaware that California legally already owns that part of the electricity they are paying for, and also that we get most of our natural gas from CA) and then commissioner Barry Wong said he plans to prevent the provision of utilities to undocumented aliens. Never mind that this would require landlords to not only turn away some of their most reliable customers, but would impose a great deal of extra paperwork on landlords; I guess the GOP is only for 'small, non-intrusive government' when it comes to things THEY want

The only post of the campaign in which I defend John McCain

Today John Lewis (D-GA), a veteran of the civil rights struggle who marched with Dr. King and was beaten bloody by police during non-violent protests in the 1960's, attacked John McCain and compared his attacks on Barack Obama to 'playing with fire' and then went on compare McCain himself to George Wallace.

As much as I respect rep. Lewis and all that he has accomplished, I have to disagree with that. As I alluded to in my last post, McCain finally stepped in himself to try and end some of the more outrageous attacks and was booed by his own crowd for doing so.

That isn't to say that there aren't some obdurate racists among John McCain's supporters. There most certainly are.

And Lewis, in saying that McCain is 'playing with fire' was right to refer to the fact that the McCain campaign in order to gin up the Republican 'base' has sometimes failed to confront some of their more extremist supporters.

However, I do not personally believe that McCain is comparable to George Wallace, who was the face and the personification of segregation during the most turbulent days of the Civil Rights movement.

Obama is significantly ahead of McCain right now, and it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the fact that McCain has nothing to offer but the worn-out and failed policies of George W. Bush. People already know that hasn't worked, so rather than keep at it for four more years they are looking to vote for something different. It's just that simple.

I don't blame McCain for trying to win the election (after all he too is running for President.) And I know that politics can get a little rough at times. But Lewis' statement should be repudiated because it's not true. McCain is not George Wallace. McCain is just wrong, that's all. Maybe comparing him to Herbert Hoover would be more apt.

Bob Herbert is spot on about Wright.

Jeremiah Wright apparently felt disrespected and angry at Barack Obama when he didn't stand 100% behind him during the controversy that erupted just over a month ago. And so he has spent the past month carefully planning how to get back, and now he has.

Bob Herbert has a very insightful column about Jeremiah Wright and his outbursts this weekend and today.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him...

Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived...

So it’s not like he’s naïve politically. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Forget the gibberish about responding to attacks on the black church. That is not what the reverend’s appearance before the press club was about. He was responding to what he perceives as an attack on him.

Add in all the things he said this weekend, and it's pretty clear that after a few weeks of careful consideration, Reverend Wright is going out of his way to do the worst he can of proving the critics right. It is certainly true that the clips we've all seen were taken as small snippets of much larger sermons. But this weekend, the snippets were the sermons as he seemed to go out of his way to project the bogeyman that the Senator Obama's opponents have portrayed Wright as. There is no way he could have in just a weekend said extemporaneously so many of the things thich have bothered people, if he hadn't thought out well in advance how to say all of them.

Apparently Wright feels betrayed by Obama's failure to stand by him, including his sermons, when the story first appeared. So he's doing everything he can to hurt Obama now. He is being the caricature that was first put out there by Obama's political opponents. And he's not a stupid man at all, I'm sure he knows good and well what he's doing this week.

A window into his thinking was revealed in the Bill Moyers interview which started off this weekend of wall-to-wall veiled criticism of Obama mixed with outrageous outbursts. He said that Obama had responded to the intial criticism 'as a politician, and not as a man.' Apparently Wright felt then that Obama had not 'kept the faith' with him.

During his speech to the NAACP, Wright paid Obama a left-handed compliment, suggesting that his middle name (which Wright repeated at least twice at that point) is a function of language, and that there are Arabic speakers of all religions. What that did was to remind voters of Obama's alleged (though completely unfounded) ties to Islamists, and of course to remind them once again of Saddam Hussein (the first person most people associate with the name) and subliminally link Obama to him.

Obama in the end did the only thing he can do now-- he repudiated and rejected Wright completely, something he refused to do in his Philadelphia speech on race.

But let's make this clear for what it is. Jeremiah Wright, for personal reasons, wanted to do everything he could to harm Barack Obama. And now Obama has turned off the pipeline back to him, so whatever Wright says from now on won't have anything at all to do with Obama.