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[McDohl]

Well-come to Planet Arizona.

Nanu-nanu.

And brown people are illegal.

[Brentai]

Up until the final stinger of the police knowing about and refusing to help him, the whole tragedy was the father's own stupid goddam fault.  Good thing the Border Patrol managed to show up at the very last possible moment to remind us all what horrific failures of humanity they are so we can all be mad at them instead.

[NexAdruin]

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/pregnancy-begins-2-weeks-before-conception-now-the-law-in-arizona/politics/2012/04/13/37993

something something pregnancy begins at the end of the most recent period.

[Shinra]

So what does this mean for the law? Are birth control pills that alter a woman's period suddenly illegal? Or prevent it? Is the diaphragm considered abortion now? The IUD?

I think Jim in your avatar has the right idea.

let's run with this further

in Arizona, if a woman falls down the stairs, is she a murderer or attempted murder for the loss/potential loss of her unborn child, because she is in a constant state of pregnancy/nonpregnancy?

Does this mean that all female smokers in Arizona, with or without children are bad mothers?

Schrodinger's Pregnant Woman is the craziest scenario.

[Smiler]

This is also a month old. We probably had this discussion already.

Edit: I can't find where though.

[JDigital]

Except in Arizona, where it may be six weeks old.

[Büge]

http://prospect.org/article/pro-life-paradox

So Arizona's banned abortions after 18 weeks, about the time when abnormalities can be detected in the fetus. That means that a lot more developmentally-disabled children will be born. Except they're also cutting funding to social programs that would help those children.

"Sorry kids, once you're out of the womb, you're on your own!"

[Bal]

That has always been the position of the pro-life movement. They've never given a fuck what happens to these kids, just as long as they're born.

[Thad]

Shockingly, Russell Pearce is having trouble finding a Mexican restaurant to hold his fundraiser at.

[Thad]

New Times: Ex-Police Chief's Book Details Arpaio's Negligence in El Mirage Cases

The author is Bill Louis, who took over in El Mirage after Arpaio's contract there ended.  I hadn't heard his name before but apparently he was in charge of the investigations that brought down three serial killers in '06, so I am inclined to think he's good at his job.

Last December 5, Arpaio was forced to call a press conference to respond to the firestorm wrought by the chilling allegations in the AP articles. The sheriff at first seemed to concede that his agency had failed badly to bring a host of alleged sex perverts to justice.

But Arpaio couldn't help himself.

"If there were any victims . . . I apologize," the sheriff blurted in his trademark blend of cynicism and bluster, which his many supporters seem to equate with toughness.

Arpaio then added, "If there were any," spitting out the word "if" with obvious disdain.

Bill Louis says he was watching the press conference on TV at his home in Peoria.

"It pissed me off so bad that I didn't know what to do or say," he recalls. "Joe Arpaio knew — and knows — what happened out there, and he uses the word 'if'? He's not tough on crime. There's a bunch of assholes who would be in prison right now if Joe Arpaio were tough on crime. What he's tough on is his political enemies and on Mexican gardeners and people who wash shirts for a living. He's much more than just an 'embarrassment' to law enforcement. He's a totally political beast who gets to wear a badge and call himself sheriff."

I think I may like this guy.

Arpaio's vulnerable, for the first time.  I still think he'll probably manage reelection -- this is looking to be a three-man race and unfortunately a split vote might give Joe a plurality -- but it's up in the air.  (I will vote for whichever challenger is doing better in the polls right before the election.  Not kidding.)

[Thad]

Justice Department suing Colorado City for religious and housing discrimination, alleging that child rapist Warren Jeffs is still running the show from his prison cell.  The police there are pretty much in the FLDS's pocket and helped protect Jeffs and his buddies -- and, worse, returned child brides who tried to run away -- for years.

There was a bill in the legislature recently that would have replaced the Colorado City Marshal's Office with out-of-towners; it got shot down basically on bullshit "The State shouldn't be taking control of local PD's" grounds.  AG Horne has responded by funding the Mohave County Sheriff's Office to patrol Colorado City so the Marshals aren't the only cops in town.  I'm not Horne's biggest fan (though God knows he's better than the guy he defeated in the primary, now-disbarred former County Attorney Andy Thomas) but I gotta side with him on this one; sending in cops who don't give child rapists a free pass sounds like a pretty good use of executive power to me.

...speaking of cops giving child rapists a free pass, fill in your own Arpaio joke here.

[Thad]

SCOTUS has ruled on SB1070.

To recap:

The administration chose to prosecute this one on jurisdictional grounds, figuring that the most effective way to get it overturned was to say it was a matter of a state stepping on feds' toes.

I thought this was a mistake, as the most pernicious flaws in SB1070 are inseparable from the issues of race, civil rights, and equal protection under the law.

Well, from the ruling, it seems that we were both right.  3 sections of SB1070 got thrown out on jurisdictional grounds -- but one, the infamous "show me your papers" section, was upheld.

With a "for now", of course.  This isn't over; there are civil rights suits wending their way through the courts right now and I see it as inevitable that it'll get thrown out once somebody goes to the Supreme Court and says "Oh hey you can't actually define 'reasonable suspicion' of someone being a Mexican without taking race into account."  But that'll take years.

The lawyer my local NPR affiliate had on this morning advised that any legal immigrants keep their papers on them for now, which is contrary to the claim I've seen in some places that an ID is good enough.  Of course, that's not going to help people who were born here and don't HAVE immigration papers.  And, complicating things further, Arizona does not require citizens to carry ID -- though SB1070's stop-and-frisk provisions deal primarily with traffic stops, and I'm not sure if there are any cases about it being invoked on people walking down the street.

Anyway.  It's a start.  But I sure as hell wish they'd overturned the "it's okay to harrass brown people" part.

[Royal☭]

Senate candidate Jeff Flake apparently supported the apartheid government of South Africa

[Thad]

On the one hand, yeah, that's fucked up.

On the other, it's 25 years old and just got dredged up by a Tea Partier who's challenging him in the primary on the claim that he's a crazy socialist.

[Mongrel]

He's got an out anyway: The language of the resolution used the old dodge that "sanctions make it worse for the blacks in SA, not better", which was just window dressing on lobbying for a mine, but give him the wiggle room needed to squeak out if he's smart.

[Thad]

Racial profiling class-action finally going to court.  (The Republic actually uses the word "finally" in its description.)

The case began when Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a Mexican tourist who was in the United States legally, was stopped outside a church in Cave Creek where day laborers were known to gather. Melendres, the passenger in a car driven by a White driver, claims that deputies detained him for nine hours and that the detention was unlawful.

Eventually, the case grew to include complaints from two Hispanic siblings from Chicago who felt they were profiled by sheriff's deputies, and from an assistant to former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon whose Hispanic husband claims he was detained and cited while nearby White motorists were treated differently.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow expanded the complaint last December into a class-action lawsuit that includes all Latino drivers the Sheriff's Office has stopped since 2007.

The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages. Instead, the plaintiffs want the kind of injunctive relief that the Sheriff's Office has resisted in the past -- a declaration that spells out what deputies may or may not do when stopping potential suspects, and a court-appointed monitor to make sure the agency lives by those rules.

Lawyers for Arpaio, who is seeking re-election to a sixth term in November, will argue that the agency does not need a monitor because there is no systemic discrimination, only a few deputies who might have violated office policy and who were punished for their transgressions.

But the plaintiffs' attorneys are armed with anecdotal evidence, their own statistical analysis of the sheriff's operations, some of the sheriff's own internal communications and constituent notes that disparage Latinos. They will claim that such information, taken as a whole, would force any reasonable person to conclude that Arpaio's immigration-enforcement policies opened a door to racial profiling through which sheriff's deputies followed their leaders.

Chickens, roosting, etc.  I don't see how he can wriggle out from under this one.

We'll see what his next stalling technique is.

[Thad]

Arpaio on the witness stand.

But Arpaio, as he had done in countless depositions and sworn statements through the years, attempted to deflect responsibility for some of those statements on to his staff members and the co-author of his autobiography.

'Bout sums it up, don't it?

But it actually gets better.  The New Times version of the story (Joe Arpaio Looks Like Tired, Old Racist on Stand During Racial-Profiling Trial):

But the sheriff made his worst impressions while answering questions about his book, Joe's Law.

Basically, anytime Arpaio was shown some of the blatant bigotry in that book, he blamed it on co-author Len Sherman. And this was despite being read back his testimony from a previous deposition in which he'd said he didn't need to read his own book because he'd written it himself.

Arpaio was forced by Young to back off from a couple of statements in the book, including one in which he wrote that Mexicans don't come to the United States with the same hopes and dreams as people from other countries.. In another part of the book, Young pointed out, Arpaio wrote that second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans were not part of the American "mainstream."

"My co-author wrote that," Arpaio blurted out.

More to come; I don't think he's done for the day, and the trial's got another week.

[Thad]

Heard another fun bit on the radio this morning: the plaintiff cited an E-Mail where someone requested that Arpaio raid a local McDonald's because nobody behind the counter spoke English.  Arpaio's defense was that HE didn't act on that tip, he passed it along to his chief deputy and HE conducted the raid.

Arpaio's gotten this far by always having someone to take the fall for him.  But now that he's actually, at long last, in front of a judge himself, I don't think it's going to work.

More from New Times:

Some of the most damning anecdotes by Young came from the collection of bigoted letters that Arpaio kept in his "illegal immigration" file.

Time and time again, Arpaio would receive a letter from someone railing against "Mexicans" standing on street corners or speaking Spanish, and Arpaio would highlight what would appear to be the most bigoted portions of the letter just before distributing it to his staff or asking his secretary to write a thank-you letter to the sender. Close observers of Arpaio's office would have recognized many of Young's examples from both news articles and the allegations levied against Arpaio's office in December by the U.S. Justice Department.

Some of the letters that Arpaio forwarded to underlings were accompanied by brief, scribbled notes that encouraged some action, such as "handle this."

Arpaio swore that the notes didn't really mean anything, that he never followed up on his suggestions and that his staff took care of all that nitty-gritty enforcement detail.

"When I sent those letters, it doesn't mean that I agree with them, or mean (MCSO employees) should take action," Arpaio said.

[...]

In several mini-Perry-Mason moments, Arpaio denied that he said or did something, only to caught in traps by Young, who played videotapes of depositions and news conferences or presented Arpaio with his own previous statements. For instance, Young asked Arpaio if his policy was to go after illegal immigrants first, and their crimes second.

"That is not correct," Arpaio answered, his voice sounding tired. As he'd done during his testimony at the disciplinary hearings of former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, Arpaio claimed he had the flu.

Young then played the video from a news conference in which Arpaio state bluntly that he has "pure" program that targets illegal immigrants and "not the crime first."

[...]

Young asked Arpaio if he believes it's possible to spot an illegal immigrant "if they look like they're from another country."

"No," Arpaio said flatly.

Young then played an excerpt from an interview with Glen Beck in which Arpaio said just that. Even Beck told him "that sound like profiling," and Arpaio answered (in the video interview) that a 1996 law gives him the right to target people based on how they look.

"You think that someone without identification who looks like they just came from Mexico is an illegal immigrant?" Young asked.

"No," said Arpaio.

And Young played another tape that proved Arpaio wrong.

[Mongrel]

You know, few things say "Way too fucking far" as much Glen Beck telling you "Er, that might be a little bit much, Joe."

[Büge]

I'm glad they've built up a strong enough case that they can pin him like this. Lord knows he gave them enough time to do so.