“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.

Brewer’s statement said she believed the investigation was a politically motivated attack on her family. She said she believes it began with an anonymous complaint to Social Security before last year’s election.

Cry me a river, will ya? Had Jan Brewer not lucked into a successful political career by spouting simplistic social conservative platitudes and were simply Jan Brewer, x-ray tech of Glendale, whatever public assistance she and her family were getting (including everything going to her institutionalized son) would be characterized as “welfare”. She’d be exactly the kind of person whom Republican politicians call a “loser” and whom they derisively suggest should turn to churches and private charity. Because, you know, $619 a day for a state facility and $450 a month or so for disability is forcibly redistributing wealth from hardworking achieving Job Creators^TM, isn’t it? And maybe she should be drug tested, like conservative lawmakers want other recipients of government aid to be.

“usc-ucla? Felt like was sitting at a newport beach yacht club. Coyotes? Midgets, special ed and axel rose wannabes nearby.”

One of the fairly immutable laws of humor is that good humor punches up, not down. Jason Rose punches down, always. Which is why he’s not funny, ever, and everyone knows it. Even the people who laugh at Rose’s schtick because he’s a rich white guy (rich white guys tend to have people around them who will pretend they’re funny) know that Jason Rose is not funny. He’s mean. Why the Special Olympics would hire a mean person to do PR for them and then be surprised when he eventually says something mean about their participants is beyond me, but they did and I’m glad they at least realized their mistake and gave him and his firm the boot.

I’ve been wanting to blog about the high school student in Kansas who tweeted that Gov. Sam Brownback sucks and blows a lot and got in trouble with her school because one of Brownback’s staffers saw the tweet and whined to the school about it. I totally defended her on facebook and still do. She was exercising free speech and Brownback’s staff and her principal’s response (trying to force her to write an apology letter and attaching the incident to her permanent record) were gross abuses of authority. Inevitably, some of my fellow liberals got all etiquette nanny on the girl about her “tone” and pearl-clutchy over the horrible “incivility” that’s destroying public discourse and whatnot. Which is unfortunate, because I tend to expect liberals to be critical thinkers and better able to make distinctions between silly tweets by a high schooler and a public officials acting like Joe McCarthy in response to it. It’s the latter kind of behavior that’s the real threat to civil society. And just in case anyone wants to accuse me of hypocrisy for condemning Jason Rose but not the Kansas student, please try to follow along: She punched up and the government tried to punish her for it. Jason Rose punched down and is getting his ass handed to him publicly, and deservedly, by a paying client. See the difference? Okay, good.

Before I finish I’d like to say something about Governor Brewer, whom I consider to be an awful person, based on things she’s done in office. Yes, Jan Brewer is in a powerful position so based on that she is fair game for mockery and derision by us peons. But punch up, people. I’m seeing way too many cracks about her appearance and age and gender slurs. When you go for the cheap shots, not only are you giving Brewer and her handlers yet another reason to portray her as a martyr and a delicate flower (while also the toughest governor in America who eats scorpions, don’t ask me how that works) but it’s neither funny nor imaginative. C’mon Arizona liberals, we’re better than that.

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.

Governor Jan Brewer announced the appointment of Jay Heiler to the Board on Wednesday, saying “Jay’s extensive leadership in education, business, government and strategic planning makes him uniquely qualified to serve in this role helping direct the future of higher education in Arizona.”

Uniquely qualified.

Before he was Fife Symington’s right hand man, Heiler distinguished himself in his own college career at ASU in the 80s for the obnoxious wankery that was typical of privileged conservative students of that era. Heiler made a nuisance of himself as editor of the ASU State Press in ’82 and ’83, where he used the paper to rail against, well, everyone who wasn’t a straight white rich conservative dude. Here are some highlights of Heiler’s journalistic career from a June 1992 New Times report.

On homosexuality: It is my impression that by `coming out of the closet,’ as their emergence has come to be called, homosexuals hope to make the rest of us less uncomfortable about their aberration-and despite one’s feelings about it, it is most definitely an aberration.”

On illegal immigrants: The immigrants come here to start a new life, then try to cling to their own language and customs. This tendency leads to all sorts of societal problems, ranging from interracial unrest to unexplained disappearances of dogs. The former difficulty crops up wherever aliens are to be found; the latter arose in California when the Vietnamese arrived.”

On liberals: Through their past bumblings, I have discerned that Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill are the two most misguided men to ever stink up the Capitol building, and that includes some stiff competition. They are paraders of socialism whose actions and utterances have left many of us with sour looks of disgusted disbelief.”

On abortion: Those with the stomach for it are forced to take note of the fact that thousands of this country’s unborn babies are slaughtered at the hands of their mothers every year.”

Fine choice for the BOR, Governor Brewer. Just what we’d expect from your administration.

Stuff like this should make us keep in mind that right wingers aren’t getting worse. They’ve always been this way.

Voters have embraced the Governor’s stance on issues from illegal immigration to the economy, but “journalists” discount it by assuming someone must be making decisions for her – – deciding who and what she supports. Would they draw this conclusion if our Governor was a man? Doubt it.

It’s no secret the playing field is still uneven, but in politics it’s magnified. While profiles of male politicians typically focus on issues, profiles of female politicians first focus on the person. Women seem to be saddled with terms that are almost “excuses” for their personalities – – straight-forward, tough. You don’t often read that someone is a “strong man”, but there are many “strong women” in politics. While this may be an attempt at a compliment, it’s really pointing out what the “journalist” considers to be the norm: that women by nature are weak.

It would be nice if journalists could escape their superficial universe of stereotypes and be as sophisticated as their readers. Instead we get stories about Hillary Clinton’s hair. Never ones about Colin Powell’s.

This is a perfect example of conservatives (despite their naked hostility to women making gains in society) embracing feminist rhetoric to defend a conservative female politician. In this case it’s particularly annoying for Coughlin to try and defend Brewer with that since the governor who immediately preceded her was Janet Napolitano. I don’t recall any journalists in Arizona assuming that Napolitano was “weak” due to her innate female nature or led around by the nose by male political advisors. I certainly don’t recall any of her advisors having to post blogs insisting that “she has a mind of her own!” Because, you know, it was pretty obvious to any sentient being in Arizona that Governor Janet Napolitano had a mind of her own.

Which gets me to what really ticks me off about this whole thing. Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Jan Brewer, et al are dangerous ignoramuses. It’s a matter of public record, and not at all sexist to point out. So there’s no need for stupid and gratuitous attacks on them. The real travesty is the amount of latitude that privileged right wing men are given. George W. Bush got a free pass in 2000 for being an intellectually uncurious dullard and bully because he was 1) male, 2) from a rich and powerful family, and 3) the Governor of Texas. Rick Perry appears to be going down the same lucky path in 2010.

If Rick Perry were Rachel Perry (yes, you’re right, Chuck Coughlin) we’d be seeing a lot of stories about her “good hair”. We’d also see a lot harder scrutiny of Rachel Perry’s personal life, and her whackadoodle positions on everything from abortion to the death penalty to oil drilling. But Rick Perry is Rick Perry. And he’s going to get a lot of latitude that he really doesn’t deserve. Because he’s a rich white man.

That’s sexist and it sucks, really.

Howie Fischer reported that Governor Brewer claimed that President Obama’s recent moves on immigration may cause a delay in the completion of her much-awaited memoir, Breakfast with Scorpions. Hagiography writin’ and governorin’ are hard, as it turns out.

What caught my eye about Howie’s piece was this bit on Brewer’s ghostwriter uh co-author Jessica Gavora:

“I have to pay for the people that are helping me,” she said. That includes co-writer Jessica Gavora, author of her own book criticizing federal laws against gender discrimination in funding high school sports.

Oh, this is going to be good, says I to myself. I vaguely remember Gavora for being married to right wing bloviator Jonah Goldberg and for being quite the bloviator in her own right with her screed about Title IX. I figured I’d see what else she’s gotten up to in the past few years and googled her. I found Gavora’s most recent career highlight (prior to the Brewer project) on a 2010 Human Events post called Exciting Books at a Crucial Time for Conservatives. The exciting book Gravora contributed to was Adam Bellow’s New Threats to Freedom.

Veteran conservative editor Adam Bellow (Illiberal Education, The Bell Curve, and Liberal Fascism) has put together a varied, interesting collection of different takes on current threats to our freedom. Threats anatomized in these essays range from “the new dogma of fairness”—the latest iteration of the inevitably destructive egalitarian imperative—through “the loss of the freedom to fail,” “bad political theater,” the UN Women’s Treaty, “the rise of antireligious orthodoxy,” ingratitude, complacency about liberty, “the urge to regulate” to Islamic shariah law. Playwright David Mamet, who announced his conversion from “brain-dead liberal” to conservative (and Thomas Sowell fan) before the 2008 election, eviscerates the “fairness doctrine.” Christopher Hitchens indicts multiculturalism. British M.P. (and Youtube sensation) Daniel Hannan exposes the European Union to well-deserved criticism. Jessica Gavora picks a very unlikely threat to our liberties—single women—and then makes a persuasive case that women are exchanging marriage for dependency on the state, and voting the way they live in such large numbers that the trend is endangering our entrepreneurial economy, the free market in medicine in America, and more.

I couldn’t get a Kindle version of Bellow’s important collection of freedom defending essays so I haven’t read entire Gravora’s argument yet but I can tell you that there’s nothing “unlikely” about a conservative blaming single women for society’s ills. It’s a longstanding conservative standby. Recall that the godmother of modern anti-feminism, Phyllis Schlafly, inveighed against single female Obama voters last year:

“Unmarried women, 70% of unmarried women, voted for Obama, and this is because when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have big brother government to be your provider,” said Schlafly, president of Eagle Forum and infamous for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Let’s examine the premises at work here:

1. Women can only exist in a perpetual state of dependency, either on men or welfare programs.

2. Despite our utter inability to figure out how to support ourselves, we women still possess amazing powers which include forcing men and/or governments to support us and acting en masse to destroy the free market, entrepreneurship, the health care system, and probably puppies and rainbows just for practice.

3. The concept of freedom, as understood by conservative pundits striving valiantly to preserve it, by definition does not extend to women. Freedom demands that women be placed properly under the supervision of husbands upon whom they depend for their survival, lest they unleash their formidable socialistic-single-woman-society-destroying capabilities upon the land!

Yeaaaah, okay.

Meanwhile, uppity liberal feminists maintain that continued discrimination and paternalistic attitudes present the biggest hurdles to women supporting themselves and families. But American women as a whole are better off than they were 50 years ago, prior to legalized contraception and abortion, equal pay laws, easier-to-obtain-divorce, domestic violence laws, more aggressive prosecution of rape, increased child support enforcement, etc. And yes, public assistance programs that prevent poor women and children from falling through the cracks into starvation because no amount of lecturing women on the benefits of traditional marriage will produce gainfully employed and eagerly supportive husbands. (Especially in an environment where many of the conservatives banging on and on about the magic of marriage also advocate for getting rid of minimum wages, labor unions, health insurance coverage, and just about everything that would enable a married couple to support a family nowadays.)

What’s most fascinating about this is that Gov. Brewer, who adopted that most iconic symbol of female empowerment, Rosie the Riveter, for her reelection campaign joined forces with someone with so dim a view of women as Jessica Gavora to help her write the book about how she overcame adversity to become a powerful and accomplished woman.

Gov. Brewer offered a deal wherein unemployed people getting the extension would be required to prove they are looking for work at least four days a week and take the first minimum wage job offered. That wasn’t enough to persuade the Republicans to extend the lifeline that would keep 15000 jobless Arizonans from slipping into utter penury.

Pearce said there still is a chance lawmakers could approve the plan on Monday – but only if the governor agrees to add provisions he said would prevent fraud. And House Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, wants the package to also include tax breaks for business he said are needed to stimulate job growth

Well, not that they’d ever consider it, but why not add a provision to stop employers from dismissing unemployed people outright from consideration for positions?

One prominent example surfaced last year, when mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson announced that it was relocating its headquarters — with 180 new jobs — to an Atlanta suburb. A posting for a marketing/public relations job read, in part, “No unemployed candidates will be considered at all.” Under fire, Sony Ericsson blamed a recruiter and quickly pulled the exclusion.

But similar ads are cropping up in job postings for everything from restaurant managers to forklift operators to medical device salespersons. An ad last month specified that a pet-sitting service in Woodbridge, Va., would only deign to consider pet-sitting assistants who were “temporarily unemployed,” as if no dog could be subjected to a sitter whose skills were not utterly up to date…

…The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has received so many complaints about bias against the jobless that officials consider it an “emerging issue.” At a commission hearing in February, even industry representatives were hard-pressed to come up with a business necessity that would require such an exclusion.

Meanwhile, two states are acting on their own. A New Jersey law, which took effect June 1, makes it illegal to exclude the unemployed in help-wanted ads and carries fines of up to $10,000 for repeated violations. New Jersey Assemblyman Peter Barnes told us one reason he pushed for the measure was learning from his constituents that “to not have a job and then see an ad saying the ‘unemployed need not apply,’ breaks people’s spirit.” In New York, several lawmakers are pushing a measure that would prohibit employers from denying jobless applicants an interview or a job solely because they are unemployed.

I’m sure our Republican friends in the lege would decry such a measure as a horrific socialistic commie intrusion upon our glorious job creators. Who don’t appear to want to give a job to anyone who has been out of work for an extended period of time. But maybe a Democrat could propose it?

From Governor Brewer’s Republic op-ed today:

Believe me, extending unemployment assistance isn’t something I want to do. In fact, the idea of anyone being on unemployment aid for nearly two full years is contrary to everything I believe as a conservative.

But we have to acknowledge there are forces at play here larger than the inability or unwillingness of some people to find work. In April, 14,000 Arizonans applied for 1,300 positions at local McDonald’s restaurants. Just last month, 2,600 people applied for one of about 400 different jobs at Bashas’

(Predictably, she goes on to blame Obama for Arizona’s problems. This deflection of blame on the part of Republicans is so frequent that I think it warrants a new acronym, along the lines of IOKIYAR: INYFIYAR. It’s Never Your Fault If You Are Republican. But I digress.)

What’s clear here is that Team Brewer is taking a (sort of) keen-eyed pragmatic approach to Arizona’s unemployment situation – 6 job seekers applying for every opening being what we’d call a “sub-optimal state of affairs”. Team Brewer understands that taking millions in Federal dollars out of the Arizona economy will hurt the economy and further exacerbate the employment death spiral illustrated by the cartoon at the top of this post.

Meanwhile Team Republican Legislators, inspired by the Austerity Fairy Freedom Unicorns, maintains the position in an economy where 60% of employers are checking credit scores, that starving people is a great way to motivate them.

“There are jobs that people can find, but people are sitting, waiting for a job like the one they had,” Senate Majority Whip Steve Pierce said June 3 in a telephone interview, explaining why he and most of his Republican colleagues oppose extending benefits. If recipients are cut off, they “would find something to do,” he said.

Some things they find to do could include “voting against the assholes who cut off my unemployment when I couldn’t even get a job at McDonald’s”. The thing is that people collecting unemployment benefits aren’t as easy to marginalize and demean as popular targets of right wing ire like poor welfare recipients and undocumented immigrants. These are people who previously had good jobs and positions in the community. They’ve fallen on hard times and are struggling to get back on their feet. They’re former members of the middle class who propelled Jan Brewer and many Republican legislators into office. They, and their families and friends, are a big voting bloc. Governor Brewer, whose team seems to have a grasp on this, is not even up for reelection in 2012. But every single Arizona legislator is.