Most of Arizona SB 1070 blocked by Federal Judge

Judge Susan Bolton has issued a temporary injunction against key parts of Arizona Senate Bill SB 1070. Among the provisions that she blocked include requiring all immigrants (including legal immigrants) to carry papers with them at all times and the provision that would require police to consider the immigration status during routine police contacts.

This is good news but of course Governor Jan Brewer immediately announced plans to waste more of the state's money by appealing the decision to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court in San Francisco. Governor Brewer apparently has little confidence in that body, making clear she plans to continue to appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And of course the Sheriff of Nottingham, Joe Arpaio, said that he will be running another immigrant sweep tomorrow whether the new law is in force or not.

One provision that was left intact allows any local bigot to challenge the police in court with a lawsuit if said local bigot believes that the police are not enforcing the provisions of SB 1070. Right now that doesn't mean much since there are few of the really odious provisions left intact, but not tossing this out could be a problem in the long run if some of the provisions are ever ruled back in play or if similar laws are passed with this provision.

Concerns for the future, but for today, this is a happy day.

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.

I may have picked the winners, but missed the margins

I recently put up a post on the race here in CD-1 in which I predicted that Ann Kirkpatrick would win a close race against Howard Shanker. In the same post I predicted that Sydney Hay would win relatively easily against Sandra Livingstone.

I am happy that I was off on the numbers.

Kirkpatrick, who I've made it clear that I support, turned in a very strong performance today. The only real question is whether she will keep above fifty percent of the total vote against three challengers. In fact, it seems that she has dug deeply into the support in Flagstaff and other areas where there are a number of liberal activists that I had expected to go to Shanker, who will finish third. Mary Kim Titla as of right now has exactly the same percentage I had predicted for her (28%) but it is a distant second, not a close third.

What this does is validate Kirkpatrick as the clear choice of Democratic voters. I don't know what the final results will show tonight, but I am hopeful that she wins with an outright majority.

The Republican race is also good news, from my perspective. For one thing, It's too close to call. Sydney Hay, who I had expected to win by a solid margin, instead is leading by a narrow margin against Sandra Livingstone.

Although as a Democrat and Kirkpatrick supporter I am strategically nervous about Livingstone (I think she is about the only Republican who might be able to win this year), her strong showing makes it very clear that the anti-immigrant wingnuts who have hijacked the Republican party are still more bark than bight. Livingstone has sent them into apoplectic seizure with her immigration plan which involves giving undocumented workers who are already in the U.S. work permits (hence making them legal) and then from there giving them a path towards citizenship. The minuteman-oriented portion of the nutbag right is livid at Livingstone, but her strong showing in which she has come from way behind to give Hay a strong race sends a clear message that a whole lot of GOP voters don't buy into their rhetoric and want humane, practical solutions. Given the previous failures of the anti-immigrant right to mount much electoral support for their candidates (most notably in not showing up to help immigration blowhard J.D. Hayworth save his district in 2006 after he had earned the wrath of local Hispanics) a Livingstone win would be an unspeakable embarrassment. Even a close race, if Hay pulls it out (which it looks as though she may) in a race which even a month ago was not much of a contest shows the anti-immigrant crowd as the small group of nuts that they are. They can make lots of noise, sure. But they can't do much to help a candidate win-- certainly less than Hispanics can do to help him or her lose.

The right vs. the right vs. the right

A group of communities and landowners in Texas are filing suit against the Homeland Security Department in order to stop the construction of the wall along the Mexican border.

The issue is that the Government, according to the landowners and their supporters, lied to the landowners about what they were going to do and how much of their land they would take, and then effectively seized the land while paying the landowners as little as $100 per acre. They did this by not technically taking formal ownership of the land, just saying they wanted 'access' (implying they were only there to conduct a survey, not begin construction) and in the process will bisect and render useless scores of parcels of private property in south Texas.

Federal law does allow the Government to seize land for matters of 'public interest' (though it is debatable if the wall is that) but apparently fiscal conservatives in the Bush administration balked at paying the going price for the land in the area (which might have added up to an eye-popping total if they had to actually purchase all the land along the Mexican border) and operating under the 'whatever it takes, just do it' policies that have marked the Bush administration's tenure, dealt disingenuously and likely illegally with the landowners, paying them practically nothing for the right to destroy their land.

Also an issue is that the wall built in South Texas will already have some sizeable gaps-- some land along the border belongs to Republican donors, such as the Hunt family from Dallas, and there are no plans to build anything on that particular land, just on land belonging to people who never donated large amounts of money to Republicans.

So this case pits rabid right anti-immigration right wingers vs. equally rabid property rights advocates vs. fiscal conservatives vs. wealthy Republican donors.

Get out the popcorn and watch to see how this one plays out, folks. It doesn't get any better than this. It's the kind of case that reveals the deep fissures in the Republican base.

Oh, and the real irony, almost laughable is that by the time the wall is completed it may be obsolete. Border arrests are down, despite beefed up security, all the way along the Mexican border from California to Texas. The reason why is because as the dollar continues its free fall, the value of what a Mexican can earn in the United States is declining. More and more of them are opting to stay home and work for pesos as the dollar accelerates downward, making the difference in the standard of living between the two countries less than it has been in the past. If this trend continues then the wall may be a joke by the time it is built, or maybe it will help keep Americans in so we don't hitchhike to Mexico and look for a job that will pay us in pesos that we can send back home.

Is Rudy really a simpleton, or is he just talking like one?

GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani is claiming that he can end illegal immigration in three years.

OK. So that means he can probably end global warming in four years, and probably end hunger, disease and poverty. Heck, he can probably get us out of Iraq in-- oh, never mind-- like the rest of the leading GOP candidates he has no plans for getting the U.S. out of Iraq, ever.

He suggests he can do it by an enforcement only mechanism, of walling off the whole border and beefing up the border patrol. He says if people show up at the border they will see the wall and turn around. The exact quote is,

"If you do this for two or three years, you'll change behavior... If people come to the border and figure they can't get in, they'll stop."

Yeah. I guess he figures that no one will have the ingenuity to come in via shipping container (like thousands of Chinese do every year) or by boat like the Cubans and Hatians, or by getting on a cheap flight to Canada first (or does he plan to wall off that border too?) or sneaking in hidden among the crates in the trailer of one of those many thousands of Mexican trucks that the Bush administration has generously allowed to operate all over the U.S. What a simplistic moron Rudy is if he actually believes that.

He says he can do it 'like he brought down the crime rate in New York.'

Uh, note to Rudy: While he was mayor of New York, the crime rate dropped sharply NATIONALLY. That was after the Clinton crime bill was passed in 1993 that put 100,000 cops on the streets, and was roundly criticized by Republicans (remember, 'midnight basketball?') and which was passed despite their fighting it tooth and nail. Well, guess what? It worked. It worked in New York. It also worked in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, Detroit, and all over the country. So maybe if Rudy wants to 'end illegal immigration' like he 'ended crime' in New York, what he means is that he plans to find a way to take credit if someone else figures out a way to bring it down.

Or, maybe that isn't it either. We know that Rudy likes to hire criminals, as I've blogged on before featuring his hiring of mob associate Bernard Kerik, cocaine dealer Thomas Ravenel and child molester Alan Placa. So that seems to be his crime plan, just hire them all. From which we can surmise that it may be that his plan for getting rid of illegal immigrants is to give them all government jobs, or working for his campaign.

Rudy is spewing simplistic rhetoric, and either he knows it, or he is himself too simple to be President. I suspect it is the former.

Call the far right anti-immigration hardliners what they are: socialists

I had a letter published in today's print edition of the Arizona Republic. Though there were some minor edits in the letter, the point is essentially unchanged. It began on Tuesday, when another writer criticized undocumented immigrants and asked why they didn't have the 'decency to at least become naturalized citizens.'

My reply was very plain: I wrote,

Short answer: We don't let them.

Every year the legal immigration quota is full. The number of undocumented immigrants is the accumulated difference between the government mandated supply (when Congress sets the yearly immigration quota) and the market based demand (the number of jobs that they fill)

So really what this comes down to is the government trying to limit the number of people who can fill the jobs, so in effect limiting the number of jobs which employers can create. There is a name for this philosophy, of the government controlling fundamental parts of the economy in order to manage it. That name is socialism. There is also a name for the competing philosophy, that the market demand for any given product will determine how much of that product is needed, and this applies to labor just as it applies to any other commodity. The name of this philosophy is capitalism.

Earlier this year, some people in Congress, with the support of the President, attempted to introduce a bill which would both give us the security of knowing how many immigrants were in the country as well as giving us information on who they were. It was a market based solution, in which those who wished to work in the United States would pay a fee or a fine and then be allowed to find work. This would not result in an unlimited supply of immigrants, contrary to what some said, because once the supply of jobs was met, the fee would be large enough to deter people once their chance of finding a job in an already saturated market dropped down low enough.

But the neo-socialists, who wanted the government to control the job market instead, screamed that this was 'amnesty,' and shouted it down.

So be it.

But clearly they have taken the socialist position, so someone should ask some of the anti-immigration hardliners why they think that socialism is better for our economy than capitalism would be.

Hal Turner issues a fatwa on right wing assault radio

Hat tip to E.A. Prez at Details

It seems that conservative talk show host Hal Turner is advocating the assassination of members of Congress if they vote in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Directly taken from his website (linked in the preceding paragraph) is the following:

They wanted to talk about my OPINION that we may have to assassinate members of the United States Congress if they BETRAY the nation by granting citizenship, AMnesty or even a "path to citizenship" to millions of [undocumented immigrants]. I will re-air the segment during my show tonight.

Which is the way some right-wingers think. If someone disagrees with you then any action, up to and including murder, is acceptable.

There is a reason why Mr. Turner and others who advocated his hard-line position on immigration lost. The reason is that the voters didn't agree with him. Most voters agree that we need to get a handle on who is coming over the border, but part of that is dealing with the people who are already here, and until we have a plan by which they can work towards citizenship you are likely to see them continue to not assimilate with our culture.

And the real irony is this: immigrants from Latin America are overwhelmingly Christian, very religious, hard workers who don't complain about what they earn or complain because someone else has more than them, and appreciate what the United States has to offer so much that they are willing to risk their lives in order to get here. They also have very strong family ties (one reason why bashing immigrants cost Republicans a 14% drop among Hispanic voters this year-- many voters are citizens whose family members may be here illegally, or who may have family members in Latin America waiting to come; I'm not even Hispanic but through my cousin I know I have Latin American relatives here (immigration status irrelevant-- they are still my family.) In other words, these are people who conservatives would be able to appeal to if they didn't keep bashing them.

But no, he'd rather (since he and his ilk have spent their wad and lost, rather than gained support among the public for their positions) advocate the people take up arms and shoot those who don't agree with them. And his show itself is an implied threat.

Which is why I am taking the time to post this to make it CLEAR that I support a path towards citizenship for immigrants with or without documents who are here in America and who have not been convicted of a crime. The best way to oppose a threat is to publically stand with those who are threatened (so, for example, the same reason I posted the Mohammed cartoons last year). However, unlike then, when I detested the cartoons but detested the fatwa more, in this case I actually do happen to agree with the concept of a path to citizenship for immigrants who are living in America peacefully.