A Democrat gets for 46.5 cents what a Republican spends $24.23 on

One of the most frequent claims made by the GOP is that they are better 'stewards' of taxpayer money. In other words, they have made the case that they are penurious and refuse to spend a dime that doesn't have to be spent, and make sure that if it is spent it goes the farthest.

Clearly, nobody wants to see their tax dollars wasted. That is true of Democrats as well as Republicans (and keep in mind that all those Democratic elected officials they claim are not keeping as close an eye on your money, are taxpayers too. It's also their money.) But let's take a closer look at a specific comparison, now that Maricopa county Sheriff Joe Arpaio (R) is planning to move into his new headquarters, which costs $92.5 million.

The building is 128,000 square feet in area. For those of you keeping track at home, that works out to $722 per square foot. Keep in mind that this is for an administration building, NOT a jail. Apparently among other things, the Sheriff is having bomb proof blast doors installed on the way leading to his office. Yeah, I know. After years of making inmates eat green lunch meat and sending his deputies on junkets to Hawaii to investigate the President's birth certificate* Arpaio claims he has a lot of 'enemies.' Never mind that there has never been a single actual attempt on his life. To hear Arpaio tell it, he is at the top of everyone's target list from Mexican cartels and al-Qaeda to federal agents who want to rub him out for being such a 'threat' to the President. Please! This guy makes Donald Trump look rational. To be sure, all sheriffs and law enforcement officers do make enemies (that comes with the job of enforcing the law against bad guys) but the rest of them all manage to do it without getting a martyr complex. Frankly if he's so paranoid about getting 'whacked' then maybe he should retire at the age of 80 instead of forcing the taxpayers to pay for bomb-proof blast doors on his office.

Now let's look at a contrast. Here in Navajo County, in 2009 the Sheriff's office needed another building for administration. Always keeping an eye on the taxpayers money, newly elected Democrat K.C. Clark bought the abandoned former Heilig-Meyers furniture store (about 8,000 square feet) for $50,000. He made the necessary renovations using prisoners on supervised work release from the county jail and moved in. The new building cost taxpayers here $6.25 per square foot, or less than 1% the rate that Arpaio's gilded new digs is costing in Maricopa county.

But wait a second. Isn't Maricopa County a much larger county? Of course it is. And of course the Sheriff needs a larger building to handle a larger staff. And he is getting one. So shouldn't this explain why it is so many times more expensive? Yes, and we just compared the cost per square foot, $722 per square foot for Sheriff Arpaio vs. $6.25 per square foot for Sheriff Clark. So per square foot, Sheriff Arpaio is spending 115 times as much (vs. 1,850 times as much if you just go with up front cost for the building.)

So what about per taxpayer? According to 2010 census data, the population of Navajo County was 107,449. The population of Maricopa County was 3,817,117. So dividing each of those numbers into the cost of the new Sheriff's headquarters, that works out to $24.23 per taxpayer for Sheriff Arpaio, and 46.5 cents per taxpayer for Sheriff Clark. That's about 52 times as much per taxpayer for Arpaio's building. And then you have to consider that a larger county means more staff, but not necessarily proportionately more because there will be at some level an economy of scale (for example, a sheriff in a small county may not need as many staff, but if the county is 35 times as large you still won't need three dozen times as many secretaries.) But this is the best case scenario for Arpaio, cost per taxpayer and he still can't get his use of taxpayer money on his new building to even be one fiftieth as efficient as Sheriff Clark's.

So next time someone tells you that, "Republican" is the same as "careful with taxpayer money," think again. They can say it, but that doesn't make it so.

* here's a thought on another topic-- every bit of evidence in Honolulu has long since been picked over, but birthers like Joe Arpaio's deputies still flock there. If the President had been born in North Dakota, do you think they'd be flocking to Bismarck year around in their intrepid pursuit of finding something that no other birther before has found yet? In fact, if the birthers are right, and the President was really born in Mombasa, Kenya wouldn't the real evidence be there? How come birthers like Sheriff Arpaio's deputies never go to a slum-ridden African city like Mombasa to look? You think that maybe it's because the surfing isn't as good?

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

Sponsor and Enforcer of AZ SB 1070 both have ties to neo-Nazis.

The first image is of neo-Nazis J.T. Ready (left) and Thomas Coletto giving Hitler salutes while confronting marchers opposed to SB 1070 last week. The second is a photo that Coletto had taken posing next to Sheriff Joe Arpaio and posted on the white supremecist website Stormfront.org after he, Ready and other neo-nazis had had a brief and friendly conversation with the Sheriff (beginning at the 4:53 mark of this You tube video shot by a nativist if you can stomach the racist commentary, beginning with the line, "too bad we can't just start shooting.")

The above photos are taken from this article on last week's demonstrations from the Phoenix New Times.

We've all heard the news here about neo-nazis in Arizona even as people on the national scene can't imagine that in 2010 they could ever be out in the sunlight and get people to take them seriously.

But let's take them seriously, because these dogs bite. We can make the case that some of the loudest voices behind immigration reform are actually neo-nazis because in fact some of them are. And more disturbingly our politicians like the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Sheriff of Maricopa County actually have no problem smoozing up to them.

And let's document. Start with FAIR, the group that wrote the law that Russell Pearce sponsored. The Southern Poverty Law center has declared that they are a hate group for virulent anti-Semitism and racism. Russell Pearce, though he sponsored SB 1070, was not the actual author. It was written by lawyer Chris Koback of FAIR and then handed off to Pearce.

So what about Russell Pearce anyway? Well, start with the fact that he was always close to former Republican precinct committeeman J.T. Ready (a proud member of the American Nazi Party, which he kept quiet about until he was 'outed' in 2007.) Ready was forced to resign his position as a precinct committeeman, but being freed of the need to keep his status as a neo-nazi secret he's been on a roll, showing up at various political events with his friends doing Hitler salutes and yelling 'Sieg Heil' to his heart's content. From the New Times article linked above, it is evident that Ready is willing to speak to all comers about his favorite topics:

"Obama's not my president," Ready told New Times as he flitted from topic to topic, waiting with Vandal (the 'name' of another neo nazi) for the arrival of the marchers. "He's ZOG's president."

ZOG is neo-Nazi shorthand for Zionist Occupation Government, the fictitious Jewish conspiracy that some neo-Nazis believe controls the United States. Ready continued his wide-ranging diatribe, segueing not very subtly into why he believes pogroms against Jews in Europe's past were a good thing.

"They [had] to expel an alien that's preying upon them. [They were] parasites," said Ready, a former Marine who was twice court-martialed and expelled from the military with a bad-conduct discharge. "C'mon, that's healthy. It's only when you're unhealthy that you've got parasites on you."

When New Times asked Ready whether he hated all Mexicans, he offered another dehumanizing metaphor: "I don't hate all of anything. I don't hate all scorpions, but I wouldn't want them crawling around in my house."

Not that the connection between Ready and Pearce is news, of course, consider the following Republican primary mailer that was sent out during the 2008 campaign and featuring a photo of Pearce and Ready at a campaign event:


(front)


(back)

Apparently the answer is that among Pearce's Mesa constituents what would be a disqualifier for office anyplace else is met with a yawn of indifference, or perhaps even tacit support. He won his primary election that year with almost 2/3 of the vote and in Pearce's heavily Republican east Mesa district winning the primary means winning the seat.

The article then goes on:

Ready then bragged about how Sheriff Arpaio had stopped by earlier in the day, said hello, and even called him by name. Another neo-Nazi, using the handle "Vito Lombardi," (in fact, Coletto) excitedly related how a photo was taken of him and his hero, Arpaio.

If you remember a couple of years ago about a plot by a small group of students to bomb Desert Mountain High School in what was described as a 'Columbine type attack,' Coletto (then 17) was one of the five students implicated in the plot. He was allowed to plead guilty to a single count of criminal damage (in connection with his burglarly of bomb-making supplies and chemicals) and the rest of the charges were dropped. Just in case you've ever taken a moment to ponder what eventually becomes of those Columbine wannabees that get caught somewhere in the country every spring before they can blow up their high school, here's your answer.

It was also clear, based on the article why they were stomping on Mexican flags and trying to provoke a confrontation. Making extensive use of Arizona's open carry laws, many of the demonstrators were armed. Presumably so they could 'defend' themselves.

There is one thing that will distract a Nazi from trying to provoke a confrontation with pro-immigration marchers. That is when someone who they believe to be Jewish shows up, as in the case of this musician:



Luckily the man did not allow himself to be provoked. After all, given that the counter-demonstrators were bristling with weapons that was probably a good idea.

You'd think that with that kind of behavior Ready and Coletto would have marginalized themselves and nobody with any kind of political ambition (or even a grain of common sense) would want to get within a couple of furlongs of them, and in 49 states you'd be correct. But in Arizona apparently a Nazi is considered less of a threat than a Mexican gardener.

Pearce at least had the good sense to stay away from Saturday's rallies and marches. Not so the good Sheriff of Nottingham, Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio of course is no stranger to controversy on the subject, having said in a Lou Dobbs interview in 2007 that he was 'honored' to be compared to the KKK. Sort of speaks for itself.

From the linked article there is also this:

This May 2 dalliance with Coletto and J.T. Ready wasn't the first time Arpaio has associated with the neo-Nazis. In March 2008, the sheriff spoke before a United for a Sovereign America meeting at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Sunnyslope, where U.S.A. affiliate Elton Hall was in attendance. Hall, 75, is a legend in Arizona neo-Nazi circles, venerated by racist skinheads for his work as an organizer for George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party in the 1960s.

And in fact, there is the matter that the U.S.A. not only is willing to welcome Arpaio, but in fact that their links go much deeper:

Yet the sheriff's involvement with extreme hate groups is not incidental. The relationship has been prolonged and intentional, arguably helping him get re-elected last year in a county where much of the electorate is hostile toward Mexican immigrants.

Since 2007, Arpaio has appeared at nativist events, accepted awards from groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, welcomed U.S.A. leader Rusty Childress into his immigration sweep headquarters, spoken at nativist meetings frequented by neo-Nazis, and used petitions circulated by extremists to justify his immigration dragnets.

Also troubling are indications that the MCSO, in some cases, instructs U.S.A. through member Barb Heller, who has bragged about her contacts with the Sheriff's Office to anyone who will listen, and who apparently receives instruction and advice on how U.S.A. should handle itself.

In other words, they will behave themselves as long as Joe Arpaio tells them to.

So under the circumstances it's hardly surprising that Arpaio knows Ready by name and is happy to talk to Coletto and the rest of the neo-nazis among the counter-demonstrators. I guess if the sheriff's department ever is prevented by a court order or some other means of conducting raids on day labor sites, churches and other places looking for people with a brown skin and no papers, it's convenient for him that he has some blackshirts ready to carry out his orders whenever he unleashes them.

A hat tip to a recently added facebook friend, Robert Czaplicki.

Won't listen to me about immigration? Listen to Ronald Reagan then.

Supporters of the new Arizona immigration law (which gives state sanction to what the Sheriff of Nottingham has already been doing with no legal justification at all) have been jumping all over the shooting of a Sheriff's deputy in Pinal County as 'proof' that we need the law.

This of course is absurd. The shooting was carried out by suspected drug smugglers and smuggling drugs is a felony and local law enforcement already have the full authority to take action against suspected drug smugglers. So the people in more danger from the new law (and the past six years or so of increasing anti-immigrant and anti-Latino legislation and ballot initiatives pushed by Russell Pearce) are 1) migrants who are NOT otherwise committing a felony that the police already have license to go after them for-- in other words those who are here working at a job and not committing any crimes, and 2) people (like one of my close personal friends) who are Hispanic American citizens who have been detained, questioned and humiliated by police for apparently no other reasons than their skin color or surname.

In fact, if they really want to catch the drug smugglers, human traffickers and others who are causing violence along the border, then destroying any remaining trust that members of the Latino community might have towards local law enforcement seems a curious way to do it. As unscrupulous employers, drug kingpins, prostitution ringleaders and others who often exploit migrants know well, someone who is afraid to go to the police is someone who can very easily be intimidated into doing anything. Any law that makes them even more afraid of the police strengthens the hand of the real criminals, not weakens it.

Maybe GOP members might want to consider and contrast the view of migrants that this law puts forward with that espoused by their biggest icon:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. -- Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address, 1989

Because in this law and others I don't see the optimistic and forward looking spirit of conservatism of the type embraced by Reagan, but instead a reactionary, angry and misguided spirit that is as far as possible from anything that Reagan ever stood for.

Hat tip: To Pres Winslow, who first pointed this out.

Brewer to sign SB 1070

It appears that Jan Brewer has decided that it is more important to her to look good to the Republican primary electorate than to show the kind of leadership that fellow Republican Governor Charlie Crist showed last week when he vetoed a bill that was popular with his partisans because it was a bad bill.

The word is that Brewer will sign SB 1070, which makes it a crime to be an undocumented alien in Arizona and will force all local law enforcement agencies to profile and round up potential undocumented immigrants and force them to prove their citizenship.

This has of course already been going on for several years in Maricopa County (and in fact one of Brewer's opponents in the GOP primary is our good friend the Sheriff of Nottingham himself) and if what has happened there is any indication a lot of people in Arizona who happen to be Hispanic are in for a lot of trouble. Numerous Americans who happen to be Hispanic have been detained and in some cases taken to jail by Sheriff Joe's minions even though they are American citizens-- a clear case of racial profiling.

Arizona already has a reputation (well-deserved, I'm embarrassed to say) for being intolerant. One has to wonder what kind of long term damage this is likely to do to our state-- especially since tourism is supposed to be one of the few 'growth' industries in the state.

Sheriff of Nottingham hasn't read his own book, says he doesn't understand the fourth amendment

You'd think if your name was on a book you'd at least want to have read it, right?

I guess not if you're the Sheriff of Nottingham.

That's right, in a deposition today, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he hasn't read and is unfamiliar with what is in a book that he co-authored (in other words he had a ghostwriter.)

He also said he is largely unfamiliar with the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In case you'd forgotten that is the one that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Maybe just a little relevant to his job description since he is the one making searches and seizures, wouldn't you think?

Arizona GOP meltdown pushing the tide back towards Democrats

Whatever the national environment is, the Arizona GOP is in a meltdown and doing everything they can to help Democrats in the Copper State in 2010.

Exhibit one, of course, is the continual failure of the legislature and Governor to produce a budget. Republicans have controlled the Arizona legislature since 1964, and during most of that time have also run the Governor's office. For most of that time we've had a steady diet of tax cuts, lax regulations on business (and of course right-to-work and the worst workers comp rules in the nation) and well below the national average in per capita state spending. And even when the Governor has been a Democrat Arizona has either had gridlock or compromise. The decades long Republican domination of the legislature has guaranteed that liberalism has never had its day in Arizona, certainly not since Barry Goldwater swept the GOP into control of the legislature when he carried the state against LBJ in 1964. So if conservatism was the panacea, Arizona would be about the most prosperous state in the nation right now. Only it's not, because conservatism doesn't work.

Remember too that Jan Brewer has now been Governor since the day after President Obama was inaugurated and Janet Napolitano was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security, and it's not surprising that her record of failed leadership (including leaving the state as a special session she had called collapsed into chaos) has caused her standing even in her own party to fall into the cellar. Say what you want to about Janet, but she always managed to work with the Republican legislature to get a budget done. Things got so bad between Brewer and her own party leadership in the legislature this year that it featured bizarre lowlights like the Governor going to court to get the legislature to send her the budget so she could veto it, and the leadership turning off the clocks on the last night of the regular session so they could claim that it had not yet struck midnight until well after the sun was up the next morning.

Remember in June Arizona voters gave the legislature lower marks than even Congress (notoriously unpopular) was drawing. And that was before the end of the regular session. Four special sessions later and the year has been marked by complete failure as the majority party could not get their own members together to put together a budget. Remember that in the Arizona legislature there is no filibuster so the Democrats have been irrelevant (particularly since the GOP leadership has not bothered to actually negotiate with them, with house speaker Kirk Adams just telling them to vote for what he worked out.) The biggest hangup has been GOP members of the legislature who are so ideologically rigid that even after making enormous cuts in schools and services in the face of a huge budget hole, they have refused to refer a proposed temporary sales tax to voters unless it is coupled with permanent tax cuts. In some cases they have refused to refer the sales tax even with the tax cuts (though it is amazing that they tried to cut taxes at all given the present fiscal reality-- largely caused by years of huge GOP-backed tax cuts that kept state budgets on a shoestring even in times of relative plenty.)

More recently we've seen the most popular Republican in the state, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his best buddy, county attorney Andrew Thomas (a.k.a. the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John) openly flouting the law, arresting and filing spurious charges against political opponents, including the majority of the county Board of Supervisors and a judge who had issued some rulings they didn't like and was scheduled the next day to hear the case of Adam Stoddard, one of Sheriff Joe's Henchmen who was shown on national media openly and brazenly taking documents out of a defense attorney's file during a court hearing (if you haven't seen the video by now you should-- it's truly bizarre.) In fact, the charges that Sheriff Joe had chief Supervisor Don Stapley arrested and taken to jail for were so flimsy and contrived that they couldn't even find an attorney in Arizona willing to prosecute it and had to hire someone from outside the state. And after that fell through it appears that Thomas will try and get Stapley himself. And just to protect himself, he's filed a pre-emptive ethics complaint against Attorney General Terry Goddard (the most powerful political opponent he has in the state) to ensure that Goddard will be hamstrung in any attempt to prosecute this obvious and illegal power play by Arpaio and Thomas due to a 'conflict of interest.' Even conservative columnist Robert Robb, who rarely criticizes Republican officeholders, took issue with the way the duo are engineering what is effectively a coup against county government:

What's happening in Maricopa County government isn't a circus. And it's not a joke.

Not anymore. It's now a deadly serious business.

County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio are alleging that there is a massive corrupt conspiracy involving at least four Superior Court judges, the entire Board of Supervisors and senior county management.

If Thomas and Arpaio are wrong about the existence of such a massive conspiracy, they are themselves guilty of an assault on the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law in Maricopa County.

I'm glad I don't live in Phoenix, but if this stands it could endanger everyone in the state (especially with Thomas mulling a run for Attorney General.) Arpaio may get most of the press but Thomas is the more dangerous of the two.

And a lot of people are realizing how dangerous they are, and that the term, 'loose cannon' may not even describe a cannon which is deliberately being aimed directly at the main masts of government.

Of course in addition to that Sheriff Joe is still running saturation patrols which may be popular with the nativist crowd (who will turn out and vote anyway if predictions for next year are right since most of them are also 'tea partiers') but by arresting dozens of American citizens simply because they are Hispanic and forcing them to prove their citizenship before being released he's certainly guaranteed that even if Hispanic turnout next year lags last year's total everyplace else, that probably won't be the case in Arizona because they will have at least one really good reason to come to the polls and vote Democratic.

Now, we learn that Brett Mecum, the Executive Director of the Arizona Republican Party, who has in the past been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior towards women, is facing felony charges for misusing information in voter registration files to stalk a woman and show up at a party at her home without being invited or told otherwise where she lived. I've been a precinct committeeman for years and I know exactly what the law is regarding voter files and who can access them and for what purposes, and it is incomprehensible that the executive director of the state Republican Party didn't know what the restrictions were (I mean, even common sense dictates that his personal life isn't an authorized use of the file!) Further she has said that she didn't tell him where she lived precisely because she found Mecum to be creepy and didn't want his advances.

Remember that earlier this year Mecum was clocked driving 109 mph on an urban freeway in metro Phoenix. Yes, folks, this is the executive director of the Arizona GOP.

Maybe the national climate is shifting to favor Republicans (though it may be radically different by next November) but here in Arizona it's hard to imagine voters wanting more of this next year.