Michelle laid it out for us:  Obama = Ice cream sandwich    

                                              McCain = Root canal

Really, undecided voters, it’s not that difficult.   

The latter were Tim Nelson and Gerald Richard.   Their primary contest is attracting quite a bit of notice for two reasons:  First, they are both stellar candidates.  Second, the incumbent Republican Andrew Thomas, is an incompetent assclown.   I’m no legal expert by any means, but I am the daughter of a criminal defense attorney and I can tell you that a 40% acquittal rate is indicative of an astonishing level of prosecutorial ineptitude.   That’s Candy Andy’s success rate.  My dad probably pleaded out 95% of his clients when he was practicing in D.C. back in the 80s.   That’s the norm.  Public defenders in Arizona, on the other hand, are regularly getting indigent defendents off the hook.   There are reasons for that having to do with Thomas’ profoundly dumb plea bargain policies but it’s also a sign that the Maricopa County Attorney’s office may be prosecuting innocent people or letting guilty ones go free.

That said, Nelson and Richard both offer refreshing alternatives.  I’ve seen both of them speak many times and I do hate to resort to a cheesy female relationship analogy, given my kneejerk aversion to most things deemed “chick”. But I can’t help myself and the input I’ve gotten from other Dems, especially women, echoes my own sentiments.  

So here it is:  Tim Nelson is youthful, clean-cut, earnest, and has an impressive resume.   He’s the Dem establishment guy.   He’s got the Governor behind him (he was her General Counsel) and the big donors.   When he speaks he likes to emphasize that last point.  It makes sense because it will take a lot of cash to defeat Thomas and Nelson has been raising crazy money the past few months.   

When Gerald Richard speaks, it’s with a fiery Baptist preacher-style oratory.   He boasts of more than three decades of hardscrabble law enforcement experience.  He claims to have had a contract out on his life by a gang member.   He also exudes the kind of alpha male charisma that makes a gal all swoony. 

Which brings me to my dating analogy*:   Tim Nelson is the nice fellow with good prospects that your mom wants to fix you up with.  Gerald Richard is the bad ass who will stomp the sh*t out of anyone who messes with you.   I’m going with my heart on this.   I’m in love with Gerald right now but if the primary ends our relationship in September, I will marry Tim. 

Donna

*It’s a highly imperfect analogy.  Gerald Richard happens to be a very devoted family man who has had a successful career and Tim Nelson has shown toughness and tenacity as an attorney on numerous occasions.  This is emotional not logical. 

The Obama campaign has tried to cloak the Illinois senator’s trip in some measure of secrecy for security reasons. The White House, State Department and Pentagon do not announce senior officials’ visits to Iraq in advance. link

John McCain, on the other hand, saw fit to helpfully inform the entire world, including potential suicide bombers, of Barack Obama’s probable whereabouts this weekend.

“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.

Oh but,

“I am sure that Sen. Obama is going to arrive in Baghdad in a much, much safer and secure environment than the one that he would’ve encountered before we started the surge,” McCain said.

Sure John. And you were just doing your part to make him and the rest of his delegation that much safer and more secure.

A sitting Democratic legislator and a Democratic candidate for the State House have stepped up to get contributions to help this child’s parents foot the out-of-pocket costs.  Dustin’s parents have AHCCS coverage, but there’s about $4K in tests and things that it won’t cover.  http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/

Okay, explain to me, so-called “Right To Life” people, why this child is having to depend upon the kindness of strangers to stay alive?   You want to compel every pregnant woman, via the force of the government, to bring her fetus to term.  So why do you vote for Republicans, who do not believe that the same government should be obliged to provide the necessary care to keep children alive after they exit the womb?

Part of the night’s agenda was devoted to honoring people from various tribes who have been active in voter participation and voter rights.   The woman who won the top award was a septuagenarian Navajo woman named Agnes Laughter.   Agnes lives a traditional life on the reservation.  She has never attended school and speaks no English.  She carries no identification because she doesn’t drive and rarely goes far from home.  Agnes had been voting at the same location for over 30 years with no problem. 

Until 2006, that is.  That was the year that she was turned away from the polls and as she told us via her daughter’s translation “was made to feel like nothing in front of my whole community”.    You see, Agnes had run afoul of Prop 200 and hadn’t the appropriate forms of ID to prove she’s a bona fide citizen.   So Agnes didn’t get to vote that day.  But Agnes was so incensed at what happened that she agreed to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the Navajo nation against the state, charging that the new voter ID requirements unfairly disenfranchise people like her. 

Which brings me to Randy Pullen, AZ GOP Chair.  Randy was in attendence at the event, along with his Democratic counterpart Don Bivens.  Both gentlemen were given an opportunity to speak at the podium.  When it was Randy’s turn I was only half paying attention.  It was the usual Republican boilerplate blather about bootstraps.  I swear to god there’s not a single subject they won’t turn into a lecture on personal responsibility anymore.  It’s getting really tiresome.   Randy used the word “persistence” a lot.   I guess his message was that if you’re disenfranchised (due to the numerous impediments people like Randy put before you when you try to vote) you should just pull up those ol’ bootstraps and overcome them!  Otherwise, you weren’t “persistent” enough, loser. 

Anyway, the reason that Dandy Randy is such a colossal putz is not simply because he stood before a community who has unfairly borne the brunt of onerous voter ID laws and told them to be “persistent”.   Oh no, it’s so much more than that.   Randy Pullen was the chairman of the Yes on Prop 200 committee and touts his continued defense of it in ensuing court cases.  http://arizonaeighth.blogspot.com/2007/01/randy-pullens-profile.html

I can’t believe he had the nerve to show his face to Agnes Laughter.  

So why would John McCain see fit to retain people like Steve Schmidt and Tim Griffin, both proteges of Karl Rove, for his campaign?   I understand he wants to win but aren’t some things sacred?   Oh yeah, and Rove himself is on board the Straight Talk Express as an “informal advisor”.

I realize the good Senator doesn’t have too much affinity for his wife. But you’d think he’d draw the line at people who were scuzzy enough to attack his child.

Guess not.

Sometimes it actually happens that way.  Sometimes, though, these initiatives are the handiwork of well-funded corporations or ideologues.   More often than not, they’re from out of state.   More often than not, they are trying to get the same types of measures passed in other states.  These groups spend millions of dollars for fast-talking petition circulators to get signatures for laudatory-sounding things like “Medical Choice”, “Civil Rights”, or “Payday Loan Reform”.  They will also sometimes get some local dignitary to sign on as a co-chair for hometown cred.

This kind of thing is called astroturfing and I don’t think I need to tell you Divas that the people doing it are up to no good. There’s quite a bit of it going on in the initiatives this year. I’ve already linked to 3 examples of astroturfing in this post.

See if you can spot the other instances of astroturfing!

www.azsos.gov/election/2008/General/ballotmeasures.htm

Have fun,

Donna

Somehow though, even with all of the made-for-TV moments I was moved. Unity is something both candidates needed, and while the news networks were still airing the warm and fuzzies to prove it, this message landed in my inbox from the Clinton campaign:

“On February 8, in Unity, New Hampshire, 107 people voted for me, and 107 people voted for Senator Barack Obama.

Today, Barack and I were in Unity to celebrate a unified Democratic Party focused on electing him the next president. I was proud to stand with him today, and I will do whatever I can to help his campaign between now and November.

Senator McCain and the Republicans may have hoped that we wouldn’t join forces like this. They may have wished that we wouldn’t stand united to fight this battle with everything we’ve got.

But I’ve got news for them: We are one party; we are one America; and we are not going to rest until we take back our country and put it once again on the path to peace, prosperity, and progress in the 21st century.”

I think we should have Unity Day every year.

I’m talking about the story that’s had our local news and the sports world abuzz.

PHOENIX (AP)—Shaquille O’Neal will lose his special deputy’s badge in Maricopa County because of language he used in a rap video that mocks former teammate Kobe Bryant.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the Phoenix Suns center’s use of a racially derogatory word and other foul language left him no choice. Arpaio made Shaq a special deputy in 2006 and promoted him to colonel of his largely ceremonial posse later that year.

“I want his two badges back,” Arpaio told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “Because if any one of my deputies did something like this, they’re fired. I don’t condone this type of racial conduct.”

I find so many jaw-dropping things in those paragraphs that, well, my jaw is dropped. He had two badges? You can be a Colonel in the Posse? Are there Generals? Is Joe the 5 star General?

But the salient point of the whole thing is that Joe Arpaio does not tolerate racism in the people who work for him. However, it’s a very narrow definition of the term that pertains to a specific form of racism: Wealthy African American athlete on Wealthy African American athlete. Joe recognized what a virulent, and growing problem this is and took swift steps to nip it in the bud before it swept the nation. Whew. Catastrophe averted.

What this latest example does for me is reinforce my firm belief that Joe’s grasp of public relations is inversely proportional to his actual law enforcement ability. This particular instance is breathtaking in it’s sheer genius-ness. Joe has now innoculated himself against future charges of racism because he can point to the Shaq incident. He will use it to shut down reporters from this day forward. His legions of fans, many of whom are the kind of people for whom the epitome of racism is black people being able to say n****r while they can’t, must be swelling with satisfaction.   

Oy.

That said, there’s something about the way Todd approaches the issue that seems at odds with what I’ve come to believe are fundamental, and non-negotiable, progressive values.  He seems to have unquestioningly accepted certain premises that come straight out of the corporate cheap labor lobby.   He’s definitely not alone in it.   The gentleman he was interviewing, an academic from Princeton who heads a study group on immigration seems to have drunk the same koolaid as well.  

They were doing fine when they were debunking myths about undocumented immigrants committing crimes and bringing diseases and all that other silly stuff that the xenophobes fixate on obsessively.   Also, I’m in agreement with amnesty (yeah, I said it) for people who have been here for years,  particularly those who were brought here as children.   If someone has a problem with that, then we are at an impasse and will have to agree to disagree.

Where they lost me is when they essentially justified the continuation of an underclass of cheap, exploitable slave labor.   Using the stock phrases like “jobs Americans won’t do”, “labor shortage”, “not taking jobs from Americans”,  “it’s just work that needs to be done”, Todd and the good Dr. from Princeton (perhaps unwittingly) advanced the cause of the rich people who would be delighted to turn the entire globe into their personal sweatshop.   Concerns over entire factories being staffed by migrants were brushed away by Todd and his guest with the insistence that Americans were getting jobs supervising and managing those workforces.   I’m not sure how that works out since those jobs only go to a handful of people.   (In a previous show, Todd made the same claim about construction crews, which used to employ native-born workers at good wages in mostly unionized jobs, but are now mostly low-wage, low-skill migrant workers.)   I was waiting for the claim that American workers are being so busy retrained for better jobs or getting college degrees (demonstrably false, as higher education is rapidly becoming less affordable and accessible) that they wouldn’t be wanting those jobs anyway. 

Yeah, they probably wouldn’t.  Especially since many of the jobs that undocumented workers are doing are so poorly paid, unsafe, and wretched that no one in their right mind would want to do them.   Unless, of course, they were poor and desperate and had their economy decimated by trade policies.  Policies designed by and for the cheap labor lobby. 

What really got to me, as Todd and the researcher matter-of-factly and in modulated tones, discussed the need for comprehensive immigration reform, complete with a guest-worker program to legalize and codify quasi-slavery, was their blithe indifference to what it really was they were talking about.  The researcher guy described how difficult it was for large meatpacking plants to retain employees and how most of these facilities have a 100% annual turnover rate, despite paying higher than minimum wage. 

Now, the first thing that popped into my mind was what kind of an unmitigated hellhole must a workplace BE to lose 100% of it’s workers every year?!  

This was not a question that Todd or his guest seemed inclined to pose (the “repetitive” nature of the work was mentioned), as the researcher went on to explain how this miserable industry would need to continue to have quasi-slaves fed to it in the US or else they’d *gasp!* move their operations offshore.

The same is true for agriculture, apparently, with researcher guy reporting that some farms are moving south of the border because of anti-immigration sentiment to the more exploitation-friendly fields of Mexico.  But actually, there’s still exploitation aplenty on our fruited plains.  Farming has long been a mainstay of migrant workers here in the US, but the percentage of undocumented immigrants doing unskilled work has exploded over the past 2 decades.  In 1989, 7% of farm workers were illegal immigrants.  By 2000 the number was estimated to be over 50%.  What happened?   Farming has always been tough work, but work and living conditions for the people who toil to bring us our produce have become unspeakably bad in the past 2 decades, according to numerous immigrant and labor advocacy groups.   They’re “jobs Americans won’t do” because the people that hire for them have made damn sure of it. 

So why aren’t people like Todd, the gentleman from Princeton, and other progressives screaming about this?   Why are we ceding the moral high ground on the rights and dignity of workers to the Russell Pearces and Joe Arpaios?   Because that’s what we’re doing when we dismiss the Americans at the bottom of the pay scale, who have seen their wages stagnate, and who are competing with illegal immigrants for jobs whether Todd wants to believe it or not.   When you have reports of hotels in California replacing African-American workers for Hispanic immigrants (while unemployment for African-American males is double that of any other group), it’s time to acknowledge that something is awry, without the accusation that you must be about to join the Minutemen.  

It’s also what we do when we spout corporate talking points about the “need” for exploitable slave labor, rather than denouncing the fact that it exists, anywhere.   There is simply no excuse for slave wages, unsafe working conditions, extortion, child labor, union-busting, and people going without adequate housing, sanitation, and health care.   I don’t care if the workers are in Mexico, Guatemala, China, Indonesia, or Chandler, Arizona.    It is not okay.   Not.  Okay.    And if you think for one minute that any “comprehensive immigration policy” courtesy of Big Business is going to change those working conditions, as they exist here in the US, in any significant way I’ve got serious news for you. 

Obviously, the answer lies in dramatically transforming the global economic system so I don’t pretend to offer any solutions as to how we’re going to do that.  But I think we, as progressives, need to remember just who it is we fight for and what principles we hold.   A truly progressive immigration policy is the one that places the interests of workers first and the corporatocracy second.