“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.

They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.

That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

– Rick Santorum

Iowa’s eventual winner, Santorum, came in third in South Carolina. The winner was the guy who proposed an open marriage to his second wife because he didn’t want to give up his mistress.

Per Jamelle Bouie in American Prospect

This was the Gingrich that Republicans love. A confident, combative firebrand, who exudes a persona of erudition, even as he offers an incoherent take on the world, the issues, and the views of his opponents. To wit, Gingrich accused Barack Obama of believing in a “Saul Alinsky European radicalism where the stage is sovereign and we are its subjects.” This is absolute nonsense—Obama is a center-left Democrat with centrist instincts—but it sounds correct to he audience. They were thrilled.

Indeed, the enthusiasm was infectious. Everyone I spoke to was either a long-term fan of the former House Speaker, or a new supporter, who was eager for Gingrich to win the nomination, and—as one attendee said—“destroy” Obama in debates. “I like him because I really enjoy watching him debate…he could just tear people apart and be really intelligent about it. And I would to see him do that to Obama”, said Cathy Nichols, a local high school student who plans to vote in Saturday’s primary.

For everyone I talked to, I asked if they were concerned about the recent revelations from Gingrich’s ex-wife, who alleged that the House Speaker wanted an “open marriage.” Chuck Gregoire, a semi-retired internet marketer, had a response that was pretty typical of the reactions I received. “We really need someone to come out and kick some but, and I think that’s really where the country is now, and he’s got the ego to get it done.”, said Gregoire. He clarified—he wouldn’t “trust him with my wife,” but he does believe that he could lead the country and correct for Obama’s presidency.

Brian and Cathy Renaud, who moved to South Carolina from Michigan after losing their homes to the Great Recession, were also dismissive of the allegations against Gingrich. “I think we all see through the media’s ploy,” said Brian, “Putting her up to talk two days before a primary? Give me a break.”

As popular feminist blogger and Facebook friend of mine Amanda Marcotte observed: “‘Family values’ is code for “putting bitches in their place”. Gingrich’s behavior is consistent with that.” South Carolina GOP primary voters preferred Gingrich to Santorum because Gingrich comes off as a tougher opponent against the Kenyan Usurper, not because there’s any difference between the two on the culture war. Individual liberty and privacy are reserved for straight white Republican men. It’s “radical”, to use Santorum’s description, for people who aren’t straight white Republican men to have those things.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I hadn’t gotten around to blogging about the recent Plan B decision because I wanted to devote the time to tie it to the larger context. I was going to post today and then I saw that Scott Lemieux drew the big picture very well in his post for The American Prospect yesterday:

“Modest” restrictions on reproductive freedom don’t ever work the way their centrist supporters intend. They always end up hurting women least capable of shouldering the burden. Two new studies underscore this point. First, Amanda Marcotte points out research in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that the Plan B restrictions supported by the Obama administration—against the advice of its medical professionals—will have effects more far-reaching than keeping the emergency contraceptive out of the hands of 11- and 12-year-olds. The JAMA study shows that this decision not only requires 15- and 16-year-old young women to get a prescription to obtain Plan B; it makes it harder for adult women to obtain Plan B as well.

This is always the problem with “centrism” on reproductive choice. The “let’s find middle ground” people are naive for two reasons:

1. Centrists take social conservative activists at face value that it’s by and large about saving lives for them. They assume we can all come together on contraception and sex ed to reduce abortions to a negligible number. You’d think the sheer amount of hyena-like screeching about birth control, not abortion, but birth control, coming out of the right this year would disabuse them of this silly notion, but no.

2. They think these compromises impress the public and earn the pro-choice side political capital, or at least mitigate political hits.

That latter belief was clearly what drove Sec. Kathleen Sebelius to overrule FDA recommendations to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter to girls under age 17 and President Obama to agree with her. It’s also what drove a lot of Dems to hail the move as plain common sense. Which is maddening to those of us who pay a lot of attention to reproductive issues. It’s cowardice as a political calculation and a bad strategy overall. Why give credibility to the worst sorts of right wing lies about emergency contraception (such as that it causes abortion or leads to promiscuity, both of which are complete b.s.) when there’s nothing to be gained by it? Sec. Sebelius and the President needlessly pissed off pro-choice activists and adopted a position that puts a lot of girls and women at risk of unintended pregnancy and the need to decide whether to abort or not, which is the very thing Plan B was designed to help prevent.

And those who are supposedly “moderate” on the abortion issue, such as Democrats who favor some restrictions on abortion but also support birth control should be at the forefront of defending over the counter access to Plan B, no questions asked, to any sexually active female. But then, “moderates” never like to be at the forefront of anything, and too many of them probably believe the b.s. about Plan B causing abortions or teenage promiscuity anyway. So that leaves strong pro-choice politicians to defend common sense policies that actually reduce abortions, like making emergency contraception available. However, even they are reluctant to take on the fight:

Gwen Moore, a Democratic Rep. from Wisconsin whose statements on the House floor on the importance of reproductive choice made her a viral video star earlier this year, told the Huffington Post:

“I think that while this was huge, [the birth control decision] is really, really huge and has an impact on millions and millions of women who would not have access to birth control…I’m withholding my dragon fire for that. I think the president has not been with us 100 percent, but I don’t think he’s thrown women totally under the bus — if he says he did not intervene in this decision, I believe him.”

If our staunchest prochoice voices in Congress keep withholding their dragon fire for the “bigger battles” while we keep losing ground, eventually there will be no big battles to win.

Sarah Jaffe, writer of the Alternet piece I linked, is right about that. The upcoming battle on birth control Rep. Moore refers to is the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for insurance plans to cover contraception as preventive medicine. Exceptions have already been carved out for religious institutions but many social conservatives don’t want any coverage for contraception, period. So we can expect more unhinged rants about the dangers of birth control from Republicans on the floor of Congress and more caving to the unreasonable and unpopular demands of anti-contraception social conservatives from Democrats.

Keep in mind that birth control is one of the things the centrists tell us we can find “common ground” on in the debate. Same with sex ed. Let’s do an accounting: We’ve been told we’ll get expanded contraception, comprehensive sex ed, increased funding for adoption and childcare programs etc. if we don’t push back so hard and try to accommodate the “pro-life” movement. What we’ve actually gotten for compromising is late term abortion bans, parental notification laws, mandatory ultrasounds, numerous attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, “conscience” clauses, “personhood” initiatives, and impediments to every girl and woman attempting to access Plan B, among other things. With successes like these I’d hate to see what failed compromising would look like.

After questioning the attorney general and listening to his responses during the December 8 Judiciary Hearing, I became increasingly frustrated by his refusal to answer straightforward questions or hold individuals within the Justice Department accountable for the Fast and Furious debacle.

Fast and Furious was a deeply flawed program. Since its implementation, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and numerous Mexican citizens have been killed by criminals using weapons obtained through the program. These facts alone signify a lack of leadership and control within the Justice Department that warrant the removal of certain individuals who authorized and failed to supervise the damaging operation.

Republicans here are leaning hard on this Fast and Furious talking point since the Justice Department released its report describing how Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engage in racial profiling and brutality toward inmates, especially Latino ones. This came on the heels of the revelation that MCSO botched hundreds of child sex abuse cases. The usual Republican M.O. is distraction and projection and this is what’s going on here: Point the finger at Holder, Obama, and Fast and Furious (distraction) while claiming the Justice Department are the ones distracting with the MCSO report (projection). Repeat ad nauseum.

Let’s be clear, Operation Fast and Furious appears to be a poorly conceived, poorly executed strategy that resulted in multiple tragedies. I can’t think of anything more harebrained and ill-advised than “let’s demonstrate the poor results of no controls on a dangerous activity with a ‘controlled’ experiment where we remove all the controls!” You can’t even call it ironic when things go, um, awry. It’s like unleashing a known invasive species into a known vulnerable habitat and being shocked when it devours everything in sight. So it looks very bad and deserves a thorough investigation. Heads should roll up to and including the highest level of the DOJ, if necessary.

Same goes for MCSO. It’s disgusting and immoral to foster an institutional climate of bigotry and persecution as a law enforcement agency. It’s unconscionable to fail to pursue justice in crimes against children. And while I’m not the slightest bit inclined to help Republicans score political points or win elections, I am a citizen so I’m not going to give a Democratic-led agency a free pass if they’ve screwed up. I want the Maricopa Sheriff AND the ATF to be held accountable for any misdeeds either may have committed. When Republicans use Fast and Furious as a red herring to diminish or supplant the MCSO scandal we all lose.

A week ago, I awoke to a passionate e-mail from a public official who was circulating a petition addressed to the Pima County Republican Party about its recent gun auction. Once again, a hard-working local elected official had been goaded into investing precious time and energy reacting to a decision that lacked forethought, as opposed to spending energy on something that would make our community a better place to live, work or raise a family.

As the father of a 10-month-old daughter, I know now, more than ever, that we should be focused, individually and collectively, on how to make our communities better places for our kids and their future.

The past few weeks as state and national media squandered valuable ink and airwaves opining over a raffle in southern Arizona, millions of children across the country started school without proper school supplies.

Instead, their parents received “wish lists” from teachers that included pens, scissors and toilet paper. Now that is something we can all work together to fix!

There are times when an obsessive focus on something diverts time and energy that should be spent more productively, as I described in my post last week about high level Obama staffers poring over left wing blogs instead of organizing to get the youth and low efficacy vote out in 2012. But that’s not the case with this Pima County GOP gun raffle. Raffling off a Glock nine months after the horrific January 8th shooting at a Safeway parking lot, where the most famous victim is an elected official of the opposing party, is an act of grotesque mockery demanding a ringing public denunciation. And yeah, after you call the Pima County GOP out for their disgusting antics via signing a petition or whatever, you can then donate a ten spot to the education enrichment fund. Like walking and chewing gum, folks.

Rodney also does this maddening thing that’s akin to what President Obama does when he blames a generic “Congress” for gridlock and inaction when it is clearly the Republicans in Congress who are the problem. It’s not as if the defunding of Arizona schools happened in a vacuum or was an unfortunate byproduct of a bad economy. Years of bad Republican ideology-driven fiscal policies led us directly to where we are now. Republican lawmakers passed revenue depleting tax cuts throughout the ’90s and 2000s and then used the lack of revenue (a condition totally created by them) to justify drastic cuts to education. The sales tax increase that Rodney praises was deemed necessary as a direct result of Republicans and was opposed by many of the same uber-right Republican politicians.

Rodney argues that we should basically ignore the shameful Glock raffle while encouraging us to adopt a business approach to Arizona’s funding problems; one that ignores the source of those problems (Republicans).

Since the election, I am now enjoying my family and have returned to the private sector, where my boss often says, “We don’t get paid to point out the obvious, but we do get paid to create solutions.”

But what’s obvious to politicians and followers of politics is not necessarily obvious to voters, especially when people who should know better are dedicating themselves to muddying the waters with false post-partisan equivalencies. The obvious solution to Arizona’s education funding problem is “stop electing Republicans”. Setting up private nonprofits to augment the lost funding is great but what will stop Republicans from using those private funds as an excuse to do yet more cuts to the schools?

Rodney invoked Keith Olbermann’s name in his piece (hippie punching), which put me in mind of what Paul Krugman said in back in July about the cult of centrism.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this (debt-ceiling crisis) won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.

I realize my opinion puts me outside of the lofty centrist post-partisanship of many in the upper echelons of the Democratic party but I’m happy to be in the company of Dr. Krugman.

So, anyway, I got mentioned on Sonoran Alliance the other day. A blogger calling himself Veritas Vincit said this about me:

It seems that the Republican Party isn’t an exclusive club when it comes to inter-party warfare.

I wish to thank Donna Gratehouse, an Arizona Liberal Diva and US Navy veteran for introducing me to the internecine warfare now raging within the Democratic Party. Without her assistance I would never have gotten as far as I have in understanding the true soul of a Progressive and why they are so angry.

He then goes on to link to a March 2010 post by a liberal critic of President Obama that I’d never seen before but supposedly went viral. The mention of my name was pretty much apropos of nothing but maybe Mr. Veritas has wanted to work my name into a post for a long time. Cool. And I’m glad for whatever role I played in enlightening V Squared (who apparently lacks both a working knowledge of history and observation ability) about intra-Dem squabbling, which has been going on since, like, forever. Will Rogers quipped that he didn’t belong to an organized party, he belonged to the Democratic Party back in the 1920s. Dems also had that little tiff over the Civil Rights Act, that minor scuffle at the DNC Convention in ’68, that little Carter-Kennedy primary situation back in ’80, and so on and so forth up to and including a lengthy and slightly contentious 2008 Dem primary. Yeah, I can totally see how a conservative like VV could have missed all that and assume that Dems have been have been holding hands and singing kumbaya all this time.

Which gets me to the bit of internecine scolding of certain Democrats I need to do now. This is more of a strategic criticism than an ideological one. Those of us active in Lefty Blogistan are very familiar with the rift between what I’ll call the Obama Loyalists and the so-called Professional Left. Personally, I’m in neither camp, or both camps, depending on how you look at it. Among fellow liberals I’m critical of the President because I’m disappointed that he’s less progressive than I want him to be and has a maddening habit of embracing right wing memes about the economy. But he still has my vote and my strong support for reelection and I will defend him against every stupid, vicious, disgusting attack conservative throw at him in my presence. And I think he has done a lot of good things and made decent incremental progress in many areas. But like I said there are two distinct camps and both are right about some things, wrong about others, and insufferable in their own ways. The Loyalists tolerate no criticism of Obama and are sometimes too quick to defend and excuse the shortcomings of his administration. The Professional Lefties are often hyperbolic and hypercritical.

That said, I’m going to come down on a very important subset of the Loyalists for this post. This Ezra Klein blog post from a few weeks ago chilled me to my core:

Greg Sargent has a nice take on the e-mail an Obama campaign official sent mocking Paul Krugman and the “firebaggers.” But whenever I read these periodic eruptions about “the professional left,” my main thought is: if I were a member of the professional left, I would be stoked.

Paul Krugman is one op-ed columnist. Firedog Lake is one Web site. They have readers. But they are not the state of Ohio. Time and again, however, we see evidence that they have gotten deep inside the White House’s head. In letters, in offhand comments, in outbursts at press conferences, in my personal reporting, members of the Obama administration and members of the Obama reelection campaign will let slip that they are dwelling and worrying over these arguments. They may not agree with them. They may not think they’re fair, or sophisticated, or useful. But they’re thinking about them. And if you’re the “professional left,” that’s exactly what you want.

The mocking email Klein was referring to was sent out by the head of OFA in New Mexico, which got some attention in Dem and lefty political circles. I consider myself to be a proud Professional Leftist but I’m most certainly not stoked to learn that the Obama administration and reelection campaign are spending time that would be much better spent organizing to get out the vote for the President and the Dems being butthurt over bloggers and Paul Krugman. Really? If you are someone who works in the administration or OFA you have a job to do and that job is not to obsess over FireDogLake and Paul Krugman hurting your fee fees.

Social media has become a vital conduit of fundraising and volunteer momentum for campaigns so, in fairness, I can understand how Obama staffers would feel demoralized and defensive by seeing a bunch of liberals yelling about how mad they are at Obama and (some of them) swearing they won’t vote for him next year. But it’s important not to overestimate the importance and influence of partisan blogs. They are useful for sharing and spreading ideas, venting, and for interested outsiders to gain inside dope. But if you stopped 100 random people at Desert Ridge Mall in Phoenix, I bet you’d be hard pressed to find one who could identify Jane Hamsher or Andrew Breitbart. Or me or Shane Wikfors for that matter. So if Obama’s approval has dropped significantly, it’s highly unlikely it’s because of what anyone on a blog said. Again, I don’t want to understate the impact of liberal social media enthusiasm to a Democratic campaign but it’s not something you can browbeat people into and if you don’t have it right now maybe it’s time to focus on other things.

I also think it’s important to note that, internet chatter aside, progressives are still in Obama’s camp. We’re the ones supporting him in high percentages in polls. At this point, we alone are propping up his approval ratings. Which makes it all the more pointless and unproductive for Obama people to spend any time punching hippies.

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.

EDIT: By some mistake of divine provenance I linked to a clip of our lovely and courageous Rep. Gabby Giffords. I’ll leave it up.

Here’s the debate clip:

It’s a really quick segment but I wanted to make sure I got the most important message out: It’s not the deficit that is causing our economic problems and cutting the deficit will not get us out of them. It’s a Washington obsession that has no relevance to the immediate needs of Americans for jobs, education, health care, functioning infrastructure, etc. Also, Brahm asked if I felt President Obama had been “rolled over” by the deal. I said not at all. Considering that the President was dealing with a Congress taken over by rabid anti-tax cultists (elections have consequences) the deal could have been worse. Which is not to say that it is good.

Shane repeated the Tea Party mantra that “spending is the problem”. I guarantee he doesn’t mean spending on the military or oil subsidies. From the Alternet Joshua Holland piece I linked:

Last year, with the private sector economy continuing to slump, an analysis by Moody’s Analytics found that almost one in five dollars in American consumers’ wallets came from one government program or another. The public sector has already seen deep cuts, and that trend will only worsen with Washington’s relentless focus on deficit reduction. Without those dollars, there will be fewer consumers demanding American companies’ goods and services, and the private sector will continue to have little incentive to hire. That’s our core economic problem at this time.

Those government programs include public sector jobs, Social Security, unemployment payments, and various forms of public assistance and transfers. Thanks to decades of racebaiting and cultural conservative propaganda many Americans are blissfully unaware of how likely they are to use a government program at one time or another in their lives.

So it’s easy to say “cut spending!” when you think the cuts are going to be to people not like you because you don’t use any government programs (even though you use a bunch of them), which is why when I press conservatives about what cuts they would make they suggest “welfare” (a catch-all for government money going to undesirable people) or earmarks. (The “no spending on undesirable people” was definitely a factor in the newly elected Tea Party Congress going after Planned Parenthood right out of the gate.) It simply doesn’t register that sweeping budget cuts may also impact veterans benefits and college aid. And most Americans are tragically unaware of how austerity regimes are used to shove through the privatization of public services and the takeover of public property by private entities. (ALEC is making great strides in privatization at the state level.)

Folks, our grandparents and great-parents went through this in the 30s. Hoover and FDR bowed to conservative business interests and implemented austerity programs. In both cases, it worsened the Depression. Austerity in a bad economy is a lousy idea (unless you’re really, really rich and will profit from it) and Americans should reject it outright and demand better from our leaders.

I have compared recent legislation and the agenda pushed by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) – when and where I can get it published in the newspapers, who can say. I will certainly try to get the information out there, as all Arizonans need to know just who their politicians are working for.

Arizona Politician’s; bought and paid for?
Ever wonder who the legislature is passing bills for? Bills that seem to be a solution in search of a problem or which have no relevancy to the problems facing everyday Arizonans.

An analysis of legislation passed by the majority party in the legislature recently shows an eerie connection to “model” legislation offered to legislatures and Governors across the United States from ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council.) ALEC reads like the Billionaire boys club of mega-corporations and political influence of corporate dollars into American politics. The Koch Brothers, CCA private prison corporations, Exxon mobile oil company, Mega Health insurance companies and many more. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ALEC_Corporations#Corporate_Board
Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. They fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC offers scholarships to these legislators, flying them to junkets in places like Hawaii, Washington DC, and New Orleans this year. All expenses paid. Unfortunately, many of the legislators who take these junkets do not report them to you, the constituents, in their financial disclosure form as a “gift.”

Let’s look at the ALEC “State Budget Reform Toolkit,” and see which of these “model” bills look familiar to you. http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/tax/Budget_toolkit.pdf
Governor Brewer signs Executive Order to form the “Commission on Privatization and Efficiency.” 5/25/2010. http://www.azcope.gov/press_releases/ExecutiveOrder.pdf
ALEC handbook – Page 32 establish “State Privatization and Efficiency Council.”
√ CHECK

Governor Jan Brewer signed House Bill 2282, which will require local governments to establish and maintain an official Internet website that contains extensive budget information that is accessible and searchable by the general public. 5/5/2010. ALEC Handbook pg 20 √ CHECK

3/10/08 –Adopted a State hiring freeze the Legislature initiated
ALEC handbook pg 23 – Adopt a state hiring freeze – √ CHECK

7/25/2011 – Legislature passes and Governor signs pension bills
ALEC Handbook pg 23 – Reform State Pensions – √ CHECK

Restructure state retiree healthcare plans – ALEC handbook pg 24 (In progress now)

Legislative session 2010 – Eliminate vacant state positions
ALEC handbook pg 25 – √ CHECK

2010 Legislature eliminates PIP Performance pay for State employees
ALEC handbook pg 26 delay state pay increases √ CHECK

2010 and 2011 Legislation attempting to privatize more state and city services
ALEC handbook pg 29 – expand use of privatization √ CHECK

2009 – Sell taxpayer owned buildings and the Capitol
ALEC handbook pg 34 – sell real property assets – √ CHECK

2010 and 2011 legislative attempts to implement TABOR
ALEC handbook pg 10

Legislature moving to stop health care reform in Arizona – ALEC guide to legislators – http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=The_State_Legislators_Guide_to_Repealing_ObamaCare&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=15113(ALEC members include health insurance giants)

All legislation targeting voting and attempts to restrict/suppress the vote
ALEC – http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=PublicSafetyandElectionsModelLegislation&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=3&ContentID=9146
ALEC sponsored attacks on public education systems
School Choice
Charter Schools Act

The Family Education Tax Credit Program Act

Education Savings Account Act

The Foster Child Scholarship Program Act

The Special Needs Scholarship Act

- √ CHECK
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The list goes on and on. So just who are your legislators sponsoring legislation for? Have they protected the integrity of our public school systems, have they worked to create good paying jobs in your community? Have they strengthened or diminished consumer protection laws? I think the answer is pretty clear. Politicians bought and paid for are not working for us.

Sheri Van Horsen, President
AFSCME LOCAL 3111

That may be the case, as now Obama’s father’s citizenship is being called into question.

“Obama is born to two parents, one of a foreign nation i.e. Britain and may have bifurcated dual citizenship which by definition is not natural born citizenship,” said Seel.

Seel added, if the President’s father was not a U.S. citizen when he was born in Hawaii, that would make the President a naturalized citizen, not natural born.

And that’s it. No follow-up and no fact checking. Seel is flat wrong here. That President Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States is not a matter of opinion or interpretation. It is not he said, she said. It is established legal precedent. President Obama, having been born in the state of Hawaii in 1961, is a natural born citizen and that is a fact. The provenance of his parents is irrelevant since neither were foreign diplomats. He’s a natural born American citizen and he proved it years ago with the legal copy of his Hawaii birth certificate. It is inexcusable for ABC15 to allow Seel to make a crackpot assertion about “bifurcated citizenship” and not set the record straight for readers.