“He didn’t feel that I had treated him cordially” in the book, Brewer explained to reporters Wednesday. “I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt.”

A White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation, said that Obama told Brewer he would be happy to meet with her after receiving her invitation. However, the official added, Obama “did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book.”

The book is what the book is. The meeting is what the meeting was. The two don’t seem to agree.

Accounts of the June 2010 meeting on immigration between President Obama and Governor Brewer right after it happened are in accord with the White House official’s description. Here’s Tucson Sentinel reporter Dylan Smith’s report from June 3, 2010:

The media lead-up to Thursday’s meeting between Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama would have you believe that some sort of ultimate showdown was about to occur.

The Washington Post said that the pair “brace for a tense meeting.”

ABC called it a “face off.”

Over at Fox, it was a “showdown.”

“A very cordial discussion,” was how Brewer described the meeting afterward.

So much for a Frankie Goes to Hollywood “Two Tribes”-style throwdown over illegal immigration, then.

“We agreed to try to work together in order to find some solution” to border security issues, the Arizona governor said after the meeting.

But that doesn’t make for good hagiography slingin’, does it? That meeting was turned into a showdown in Scorpions for Breakfast and Jan Brewer was transformed into a cross between Gary Cooper and Penelope Pitstop.

“We sat down and started with some chitchat,” she writes. “But after a few minutes, the president’s tone got serious – and condescending.”

Brewer’s magnum opus was ghostwritten by Jessica Gavora, wingnut welfare recipient, who had distinguished herself prior to Scorpions by contributing a wingnutty essay about the horror of unmarried women to a collection of wingnut welfaristarian diatribes about threats to freedom.

Obviously Gavora, a writer with so prodigious a talent for right wing spin, wasn’t going to let a meeting between President Obama and Governor Brewer taking place at the height of the SB1070 hubbub escape with a mere “cordial” description. Oh no. It had to be so much more epic than that. It looks like Governor Brewer wasn’t prepared for the possibility of President Obama being briefed on Gavora’s embellished account of their meeting in 2010. Not that it will matter to her fans but it should matter to people who report on political matters here.

O’Keefe’s video shows individuals in polling stations throughout New Hampshire attempting to vote using the name of recently deceased persons in this week’s primary election. While his video shows smooth-sailing for every attempt, the reality is that the actions were so suspicious, they prompted a voting supervisor to call the police. Before O’Keefe released his edited version of the attempts, news outlets were already printing reports on this suspicious behavior.

As a result, O’Keefe has demonstrated that attempting to systematically rig an election via voter impersonation fraud is not feasible at the scale necessary without being caught. Instead, proposed Voter ID laws would only make it harder for legitimate citizens to be able to vote. One election law expert told TPM that O’Keefe’s next video should “show how easy it is to rob a bank with a plastic gun.” While such a move could be done a few times, there are already laws against it—just like laws against voter impersonation—and such a person would get caught pretty quickly.

Of course, someone attempting to rob a bank with a plastic gun to prove what they perceive as a legal weakness would likely run afoul of the law—and it looks like O’Keefe’s attempts at voter fraud are no different.

But none of that is going to deter our GOP state legislators from attempting to erect yet more barriers to voting based on apocryphal tales of hordes of undocumented Mexicans casting votes. Back in December State Senator and crazy person Sylvia Allen made the claim to a Tea Party gathering in Payson. And she had proof, y’all. Eyewitness accounts of those people flagrantly registering to vote! In front of Hispanic markets and everything!

Sen. Allen also decried various efforts to increase voter turnouts, with things like mail-in ballots and online voter registration. Allen said efforts to make it easier to register and vote could make it much easier for illegal immigrants to sway elections. “There are people voting who should not vote and there are lots of them. It’s bad enough that they’re here without permission.”

She cited as an example the successful effort to recall Senate President Russell Pearce who gained national attention for pushing strong state measures to curb illegal immigration. She said people in front of markets in Hispanic communities in Pearce’s district registered people to vote.

“There were people at those markets who hated Russell Pearce. They were registering people for a month, but no one checked that. One reason they want open borders is they want to merge us with Mexico.

“They’re being lied to and told they can vote. We need to work on this. What are we going to do if people can’t see it’s you voting (with an online ballot or mail-in ballot). We need to see what we can do to protect our vote.”

Ironic how it was not too long ago mail-in ballots and online registration heavily favored the “right” kind of voters but now they have to go because the “wrong” kind of voters have more access to computers.

ci·pher noun, often attributive \ˈsī-fər\

Definition of CIPHER

1
a : zero 1a
b : one that has no weight, worth, or influence : nonentity

So much going on today! Hard to pick what to write about. Let’s see: The independent redistricting outrage (public meeting going on in Scottsdale as we speak, with many of my East Valley peeps in attendance). Russell Pearce recall (ABC15 announced a poll tonight showing a dead heat between Jerry Lewis at 46% and Pearce at 43%). Mitt Romney endorsed Mississippi’s Personhood Amendment today (putz). More harassment allegations against and evasion by Herman Cain (putz). All GOP Reps voting against infrastructure funding (putzes extraordinaire).

But I’m going to write about Channel 12′s Brahm Resnik reviewing Governor Jan Brewer’s magnum opus, Scorpions for Breakfast. My hero! He read it (in an hour he says) so the rest of us would be spared.

So obsessed, that Jan Brewer created a Google alert for “Jan Brewer.” It’s a wonder that alert didn’t crash the state e-mail server — or crash the governor herself.

“I couldn’t help myself,” the governor writes of her Web watch.

The book provides a meticulous accounting of the red-hot hate directed at Brewer (“Hitler’s daughter,” “Satan’s (inappropriate term),” “brainless blond bimbo”). She read many of the insults and slurs on blogs, she writes, even as her staff implored her not to pay attention to “losers.”

Brewer describes the personal attacks as “torture” the equal of waterboarding. “I could barely breathe,” the governor writes.

By now you know the rest of the book doesn’t revisit the infamous 13 seconds of silence during Brewer’s 2010 debate with Democratic opponent Terry Goddard. The governor does write about headless bodies — but they’re not in the Arizona desert.

I can actually empathize with that since you wouldn’t believe some of the comments I’ve gotten from angry conservative troll-men in my queue. It’s jarring. And look, I don’t cotton to gender slurs, whether they’re against my kind of woman or Jan Brewer’s. Opponents of Brewer and SB1070 haven’t done the cause any favors by calling her ugly names based on her being female (I include myself in this because I’ve made references to her being a “witch” on Facebook a time or two and I’m going to stop doing it henceforth). It’s cheap, too easy, and needlessly counterproductive.

That said, I don’t think Jan Brewer is tough. Or smart or principled. That’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because she’s a modern-day Republican politician. Of course she sits on the internet all day googling her name, when she’s not making appearances before adoring throngs. She does so for the same reason that Russell Pearce trawls white supremacist sites for hours on end and another Republican Arizona state legislator whom I didn’t name on this blog can spend hours on Facebook kvetching about how slutty 14 year old girls are these days. And Trent Franks can indulge his non-stop abortion obsession. They have lots of time to dwell on those things because they have no reason to become anything resembling policy experts. That work is done for them, via innumerable right wing think tanks, lobby shops, PACs, PR firms, etc. All they have to do is repeat the talking points while looking stern, concerned, excited, or maudlin about them as the situation requires.

So they fill their gobs of extra time up with what really interests them – which in most cases is sadly embarrassing narcissism or reactionary authoritarian narcissism, or a combination of both. This is why the GOP is having so much trouble with their Presidential candidates. They’re ciphers, not leaders.

Tough tough tough! So tough, she can call a special session to unseat the independent Chair of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission from New York City, where she is slinging her ghostwritten hagiography Scorpions For Breakfast. Sure, she safely avoided having to answer questions from the “liberal media” here in AZ about this latest move against the AIRC, but stop calling her yeller because Governor Brewer bravely fielded queries about Arizona’s immigration law on commie MSNBC!!

Oh wait, it was on Morning Joe, but whatever, shut up!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Governor Brewer feels the AIRC’s work is a most egregious offense against the Arizona Constitution, public confidence, and integrity. Still, it’s apparently not important enough to the Governor to pry herself from her book tour in NYC to come back here and lead the charge to save Arizona’s democracy from the grasping clutches of competitive districts. I guess she has her priorities.

Still, it was famed the superannuated action star Chuck Norris who suggested the title for Brewer’s bound-for-the-dollar-bin autobiography. Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups, he does “Earth downs”. So, I have to concede one toughness point to Brewer.

Let me start by saying that the “non-denominational Bethany Bible Church is enormous. It’s a large campus with several buildings, including the spacious auditorium where the Tour was held. It staggers me when I consider that Bethany Bible is but one of many similarly ostentatious mega-churches in the Valley. There are at least four I can think of right off the top of my head within the North Central Phoenix corridor. There were three within a five mile radius of my house when I lived in Ahwatukee. Gleaming monuments to tax exemption.

I arrived at 9:20 and parked my car in the huge parking lot. Hundreds of people had already arrived and I saw many late-model expensive cars and SUVs. I checked in at the registration table and entered the event. Outside the auditorium were the inevitable exhibitors and here they were the usual assortment of Crisis Pregnancy Centers, missionary groups, and hawkers of (expensive) religious training materials. I got two free DVDs as I walked around the displays. One was for the Truth Project and the other was a Dr. Del Tackett lecture.

I took a seat inside. It was a nearly sold out crowd. Let me say that I didn’t go intending to poke fun at the facilitators or the attendees. Which is probably a good thing because I certainly didn’t find anything amusing there. The whole thing filled me with disgust from the get-go. The crowd was easily 95% lily-white and affluent looking. They had that smug sanctimonious air about them that turned me off from organized religion at a very early age.

The program started with some local CAP dude laying out the agenda and telling what I suppose were jokes, since they drew peals of laughter, but I couldn’t understand them because they were in evangelical code language. Then there was an inspirational video about something or other. And then Cathi Herrod got up and said some things and then it was time for Dr. Tackett.

Del Tackett is “the author, architect and teacher for Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project” according to his website. CAP enthusiastically pushes the Truth Project in its work here in Arizona. Tackett’s speech to the Faith in Action crowd was mostly hokey platitudes and he reminded me of every scam artist motivational or snake oil pusher I’ve ever listened to. I looked around at the smug affluent white people in the audience around me, who were nodding in rapt agreement at everything he said, and thought “You have GOT to be kidding me. You guys are really falling for this charlatan?” There was a theme to Tackett’s sales pitch, though. He emphasized the need to “love thy neighbor” and stressed the importance of small groups within the larger church. This has been an important strategy for right wing theocrats. Small groups make people in them feel more connected and also more obligated and accountable. This is also how cults and pyramid schemes operate.

Tackett loaded his talk with personal anecdotes of international travel and they always ended well, with the people he encountered receiving whatever Biblical wisdom he wanted them to receive. What a phony. Oh, and “God loves freedom” and numerous references to The Enemy, as in “God loves to empower. The Enemy does the opposite.” “The Enemy wants to suck all power.” Woo, that sounds scary.

Tackett was finally done and it was Cathi Herrod’s turn to speak. That, of course, was preceded by a hagiography video about CAP and Cathi Herrod. Herrod describes herself as a “former pro-choice feminist” who came to Jesus while in law school. She is very glib and really lays on the faux folksy and maternal schtick. The Faith in Action Tour billed itself as getting Christians involved in the community. Herrod made it clear that involvement meant political. Really strong pitch to get the audience motivated to pressure politicians to enact “family values” legislation. Which means banning abortion, getting the gays back in the closet, and tax dollars going to religious schools, among other things. Herrod got big applause when she claimed that a reduction in the number of abortions in Arizona was due to CAP sponsored laws limiting access to abortion. And when she praised “crisis pregnancy centers”.

When she was done State Senator Rick Murphy and his wife Penny got up and talked about the many children they’ve adopted and fostered. Which is laudable, except for the part where they emphasized how important it is to inculcate the young charges with “Christian Values”.

Next up was the Q and A panel featuring Herrod, Dr. Tackett, and some woman named Carmen Pate. They each did some opening remarks. In hers, Herrod spoke of being concerned about religious liberty – being able to “practice religion in the public square”, as she put it. She resents the expectation that the practice of religion should be “confined to the four walls of church”. Yeah, no shit, Cathi. She also said something that really made me want to line up to ask a question (unfortunately I couldn’t stay past noon because I had other obligations). She said CAP had to “watch our rhetoric” and that “we’re involved with every issue except immigration”. Now isn’t that special? It’s not like the issue impacts, you know, families or anything, right? Yeah, don’t want to piss off your lily white Republican followers, do you Cathi?

I stayed around to a few questions but it was getting close to noon and I was going to throw up if I stayed any longer. But I did hear a couple. Okay, so I’m not a religious or spiritual person at all but I do know plenty of people who participate in organized religion or their own version of faith and they seem to derive something positive from it. Fine with me. They seem happy with their lives, are not assholes in general, and are not pushing anything on me. The audience at this CAP thing is a whole nother breed. They seem to find neither comfort nor exaltation in their beliefs. Their lives are of hard struggle and martyrdom. And what so besets these well-fed white Mercedes driving Christians? Well, one lady was terribly upset about a porn shop opening near her! Another, a school teacher, was terribly worried about her students who carried Bibles feeling awkward about it. Then there was the gentleman who faced the terrifying trauma of having to work for a company with anti-discrimination policies which make it impossible for him to pester uh “witness” to his homosexual co-workers.

Yeah, these people have such big problems, don’t they? These are your “values voters” right here. And this is the stuff they value. They make me sick.

Also, CAP sent questionnaires to Russell Pearce and Jerry Lewis (LDS members both, BTW) for the recall election. Most of the questions were standard fare (abortion, gays, gambling, regulating strip clubs) and Pearce and Lewis answered almost identically, favoring the conservative position. (What, you really thought Jerry Lewis was a left wing plant?)

But two questions struck me as incongruous with CAP’s churchy “family values” mission.

Question 10 – Requiring employers to recognize a union without a secret ballot election by their employees (called “card check”).

Uh, are they doing pagan rituals at the union meetings these days?

Question 14 – Passing state laws that authorize law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration laws.

Okay, when has CAP ever been concerned about the plight of immigrant families, ever? They never say boo when families are ripped apart by raids They took no position on SB1070 in 2010.

“It’s just a matter of resources,” said Aaron Baer, communications director for the Center for Arizona Policy. “We’re a relatively small operation and there are only so many issues we can work on. And because of that, immigration is just not something that we feel called to.”

Right, resources. Hey, I guess it doesn’t take much to include a question on their recall election questionnaire about immigration. I don’t suppose they were hoping that one of the candidates would answer the “wrong” way, do you?

Michele Bachmann garnered a mere 94%. Michele Bachmann. Yet another gentle reminder to my fellow lefty Arizonans who still insist that Jeff Flake is a moderate Republican because he’s “pro-immigrant” (which he is not): Flake votes in lockstep with fetal-fetishist Trent Franks and both of them are more right wing than Michele Bachmann.

ALEC itself is a tool for hundreds of corporations to use for the sole purpose of obtaining access to thousands of legislators and then exploiting that access to pass profit-making legislation. ALEC works like a think tank, devising legislation that benefits the corporate elite at the cost of the masses and then putting that model legislation in the hands of legislators along with gifts and incentives to urge their passing and now more than 200 of ALEC’s model bills have become actual laws throughout the country over the past year. The links between corporate greed, state oppression, and you have never been clearer.

This website is dedicated to the rising resistance against ALEC, their planned summit, and all corporate greed that would serve to perpetuate state oppression in already impoverished communities on already occupied land. Here you will find a lot more information on the link between ALEC, the private prison industry, and recent legislation like Arizona’s own SB-1070; you will find news articles, reports, and websites exposing ALEC; you will find multimedia pieces explaining the growing and explicit connections between corporate power and community oppression; you will find links to other websites and organizations building resistance in Arizona; and lastly, you will find ways to plug in.

We’re calling on all people to take a stand.

*Come to Phoenix from November 29-December 3 to tell ALEC we will not allow them to further criminalize and oppress our communities in order to fatten the coffers of their corporate members.

*Organize an action in your community for November 30th.

I don’t know who is behind it but I’m going to hazard a guess they’re based in Tucson (on account of they list Tucson first in their “about us” page, just a hunch). Also, the impetus behind it appears to be ALEC’s heavy involvement in private prisons and targeting immigrants to fill those prisons.

Here’s their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/AZ-resists-ALEC/247353411962424

So, let’s reiterate: if we get rid of that Clean Elections system, we’ll have fewer extremists (who, of course, are on both sides) in the legislature. This is true on the Republican side because responsible business leaders will weigh in and become a moderate, pragmatic force in their primaries.

Okay.

By the way, did I tell you that the Arizona chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses has thrown in with Russell Pearce?

What’s a bit of intimidation of fellow legislators, consorting with racists, and fearmongering lies as long as he votes against tax increases and regulation?

Word to Republican business leaders: instead of quietly complaining to Democrats about the slopeheads and knuckledraggers that have taken over your party, how about you stop supporting them?

Here’s NFIB’s press release (emphasis mine):

July 25, 2011
By NFIB/Arizona 1 Comment

Small-business association standing up for lawmaker who has stood up for its members

PHOENIX, Ariz., July 25, 2011 — In a less petty political world, no association should have to issue a news released endorsing a candidate for the state legislature in a July of an odd-numbered year, but in doing so today Arizona’s leading small-business group wanted to make an early, emphatic and unqualified endorsement of Senate President Russell Pearce for election, once again, to his 18th Legislative District seat.

“We’re making our endorsement of Russell Pearce early to register small business’ strong support for one of Arizona’s most pro-small business lawmakers as he faces a needless November 8th special election to represent a constituency who overwhelmingly voted for him nine months ago just as they have in five prior elections,” said Farrell Quinlan, Arizona state director for the National Federation of Independent Business.

“Small business is rallying to stand up for the man who has stood up for small business for more than a decade. His recall is a shameful abuse of the election process and a wasteful distraction from the Legislature’s important work of helping Arizona’s private sector create jobs again. Nothing in Russell Pearce’s actions since the last election warrants this recall election. The next regular election would have been the appropriate time for his political opponents to try a seventh time to defeat him.

“With apologies to noted political philosopher Dennis Green, District 18 voters will say ‘Russell Pearce is who we thought he was!’ and re-elect him handily on November 8th,” Quinlan quipped.

In the May release of NFIB’s 2011 legislative Voting Record, Pearce posted a 100-percent, pro-small-business voting tally on 15 issues vital to Main Street, mom-and-pop businesses repeating his perfect voting record on small business’ legislative agenda from 2009-2010.

The formal endorsement of Pearce was made by the NFIB/Arizona SAFE Trust, the political action arm of the association. More information can be found on President Pearce’s website at www.russellpearce.com.

Arizona’s business class Democrats (many of whom want to get rid of Clean Elections) will insist that NFIB and other business leaders supporting Senate President Pearce against the recall are doing so out of pragmatic considerations over legislative retaliation should Pearce survive. That’s reasonable but it also makes the point of Clean Elections supporters like myself and Ted: There’s no Clean Elections in this recall but the business community still isn’t throwing its weight behind Pearce’s moderate challenger.

And it’s important for all Arizona Dems to disabuse themselves of the notion that the GOP here is run by clear-eyed rational fiscally-minded automatons. Immigration looms so large here that it has led to the strange situation where being slightly to the left of JT Ready on the issue earns a Republican politician a “moderate” label among a lot of Democrats. Jeff Flake, who is anti-choice and holds some pretty horrid economic positions, is often described that way in progressive circles (despite having expressed opposition to birthright citizenship since at least 2006). Oy vey.

The Republican business community is given the same latitude. They’re “good on immigration” because they don’t want their low wage workforce rounded up (or to have to use E-Verify) and don’t care for the impact of SB1070 boycotts (duh). But does that make them moderate? Does that mean that Arizona Democrats should jettison Clean Elections in the hope that Republican business people in Arizona will notice how rilly rilly reasonable and mainstream we are? The evidence certainly doesn’t lead to that conclusion. Campaign contributions to and endorsements of rabid right wing anti-immigration and socially conservative Republicans over and over again by business leaders and lobbyists put the lie to that. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that Russell Pearce et al. have been who they thought they are. And they like them that way.

I found this recent interview with Wright, conducted by “Western Free Press”. They’re clearly a sympathetic conservative outfit. The interviewer lobs predictably softball questions allowing her to give equally predictably platitudinous answers. It’s mostly a yawner but her responses starting at 4:30 in the video point to some issues I don’t think have been addressed regarding using private contractors to “save taxpayers money”.

Wright was asked about SB1322, a vetoed bill that would have required cities with over 500K people (namely Phoenix and Tucson) to submit all “non-essential” (meaning not police or fire) services to a bidding process where private contractors would be able to vie against city agencies to do them. Wright got really animated at this point, talking about how her husband works at a major corporation and they don’t mow their own lawns, clean their own bathrooms, or even provide their own security guards. And it works beautifully! She also suggests that City of Phoenix employees are making $100K a year to mow lawns.

Needless to say she’s way off about that. The City of Phoenix website says the pay range of groundskeepers is $27,227 to $34,653. Unless they have some really impressive health care plans they’re not getting anywhere near $100K in compensation. But groundskeepers working for the City of Phoenix are probably making a lot more than their counterparts at Acme Contracting Conglomerate.

Why should lucky ducky city employees who mow lawns be making a subsistence wage when those who mow lawns at Wright’s husband’s firm are getting by on less-than-shit wages as the Lord intended?

Well, private contractors have a lot more latitude to cut corners. One of the ways they do that is through labor costs. I don’t suppose candidate Wright, who is a supporter of SB1070 and who is proud to have the support of AZ Senate President Russell Pearce, has done much research on the prevalence of certain hiring practices by corporate and government contractors.