AZ New & Blogs

• John Stossel on Drugs and the Drug War
• Immigration, Individual Rights, and the New Deal 
• In fact, until the 1930’s, the US was generally (though not perfectly) open to immigration, because we accepted the premise that someone who was born beyond our borders had no less right to find their fortune in this country than someone born in Boston or New York.  I won’t rehash the history of immigration nor its importance to the building of this country, because I don’t want to slip from the philosophical to the pragmatic in my arguments for immigration.
• My Immigration Reform Plan 
• For the first 150 years of this country’s history, our country was basically wide-open to immigration.  Sure, there were those opposed (the riots in NYC in the 19th century come to mind) but the opposition was confined mainly to xenophobes and those whose job skills were so minimal that unskilled immigrants who could not speak English were perceived as a threat.   It was only the redistributionist socialism-lite of the New Deal and later the Great Society that began to make unfettered immigration unpopular with a majority of Americans, who rightly did not wish to see the world’s poor migrate to the US seeking an indolent life of living off of government handouts.
• This is phenomenal.  After years of being stay-at-home moms or whatever, women in America decided it was time to go to work.  This was roughly the equivalent of having 40,000,000 immigrants show up on our shores one day looking for work.  And you know what? The American economy found jobs for all of them, despite oil embargos and stagflation and wars and "outsourcing".
• Kobach’s Defense of SB1070 
• When our governor is saying that the majority of Arizona’s 500,000 illegal immigrants are all drug mules, that none of them are really looking for honest work, and that all they do is cause crime up to and including beheadings in the desert, I get angry to hear the same stupid arguments that many of our grandparents heard about their ethnic groups (though the beheading thing seems to lack historical precedent).  (more on the immigration non-crime wave here).
•  The language of SB1070 has never matched the arguments supporting it.  SB1070 mainly gives the police power to be more intrusive at certain traffic stops and harass day labor centers.  What in the heck does this have anything to do with drug cartels and armed paramilitary gangs on the border?  If, as our governor says, illegal immigrants are not really looking for legitimate work, then why is most of our enforcement via employers offering legitimate work?
• No, the Arizona travel alert isn’t just a stunt 
• The American Civil Liberties Union is raising eyebrows with the travel alert it has issued for Arizona, even before the state’s infamous SB 1070 (PDF) goes into effect.
• The ACLU points out that police, especially in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Venezuela-esque Maricopa County fiefdom, “are already beginning to act on provisions of the law” and their efforts are “meant to create a hostile enough environment for Latinos and other people of color that they voluntarily leave the state.”
• July 7, 2010: "Guest Workers Aid Border Security" featuring Stuart Anderson 
• @7:14: What we saw in the past is that under the Pesero (sp) program, which is an agricultural labor program, we saw that what happened was the Mexican farm workers were able to come in legally to work.  And when there was increase inforcement around 1953 -'54 what we saw happen was at the same time the US government made it easier for people to come in legally under the Pesero program and while 1953 approximately 880,000 people were apprehended at the border which is kind of a proxy for illegal entry by 1959 the numbers had fallen to well under 100,000, which all told represented approximately a 90% decrease in illegal entry.  The Pesero program was later tightened up in terms of its rules and later abandoned altogether by congress by complaints from labor advocates in 1964 and we saw that that was the beginning of the great increases in illegal entry that we see up to the present day.  End @8:39
• Cartels using children to bring drugs to the US 
• Records kept by Customs and Border Protection show 130 minors were caught attempting to bring drugs through entry ports from Sonora into Arizona during fiscal year 2009, an 83 percent increase over the previous year.
• My thoughts:  Prohibition doesn't work.  Where there is a demand you will get the services if people truly want it.  This article is another good argument for legalizing drugs.  Remember the government can't even keep drugs out of jails and away from children.  What makes people think they can keep our borders safe from drug dealers?
• True News Tucson debunks the closing of parts of AZ 
• Boldly risking certain death by decapitation at the hands of ubiquitous Mexican drug smugglers, "Real News Tucson" drives through the section of southern Arizona supposedly ceded to Mexico. Oddly enough, the only trouble they encounter comes at a Border Patrol checkpoint two dozen miles inside the border, where they are definitively told by a BP agent that the notion part of Arizona has been surrendered to Mexican control -- and are therefore inaccessible to Americans -- is "false information."
• Addicted to the Warfare State 
• Retired Mesa police officer Bill Richardson, who worked in counter-narcotics task forces in several Arizona counties, believes that Babeu -- like Arpaio and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (chief sponsor of SB 1070) -- is "fanning the flames of fear, that the undocumented are the root cause of crime in Arizona. In fact, they are not."
• Feds Challenge Arizona Immigration Law 
• Yesterday, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Arizona’s recently enacted law that is designed to curb illegal immigration. The Arizona law has not yet taken effect — that will occur on July 29.  To generate more discussion and debate, Cato will be hosting a policy forum on the legal challenge and related issues on July 21.  If the weather in DC continues to cooperate, it will feel like we are actually in Arizona.
• Big Money Speaks 
• While there was some evidence of statistically significant changes in one of the five goals of Maine’s and Arizona’s public financing programs, we could not directly attribute these changes to the programs, nor did we find significant changes in the remaining four goals after program implementation. Specifically, there were statistically significant decreases in one measure of electoral competition—the winner’s margin of victory—in legislative races in both states. However, GAO could not directly attribute these decreases to the programs due to other factors, such as the popularity of candidates, which affect electoral outcomes. We found no change in two other measures of competition, and there were no observed changes in voter choice—the average number of legislative candidates per district race. In Maine, decreases in average candidate spending in House races were statistically significant, but a state official said this was likely due to reductions in the amounts given to participating candidates in 2008, while average spending in Maine Senate races did not change. In Arizona, average spending has increased in the five elections under the program. There is no indication the programs decreased perceived interest group influence, although some candidates and interest group officials GAO interviewed said campaign tactics changed, such as the timing of campaign spending.
• Additional Medicaid funding stalls in Congress putting AZ in a bind  (Subscriber)
• Hope is fading that Congress will approve hundreds of millions of dollars that Arizona is counting on to operate its Medicaid program, and state lawmakers don’t know whether they’ll have to scrounge for cash, beg for help or drastically downsize the state-run health care system. In late May, the U.S. House of Representatives stripped $24 billion ...
• My thoughts: More reason to stop socialism.  There's no reason that AZ should be beholden so much to the federal government.
• The DailyShow with Jon Stewart:  Arizona's Photo Radar 
• Olivia Munn explores the debate between Arizona's highway safety and the invasion of privacy.
• After Words with Judge Andrew Napolitano 
• The Libertarian commentator debates politics, history and what he considers to be the unconstitutional behavior of both the Bush and Obama administrations, with consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
• My thoughts:  This is very good.  I would highly recommend watching it.
• Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan? 
• Just before dawn on Dec. 24, an American cruise missile soared high over the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, arced down toward the dark mountains above the Rafadh Valley in Yemen's Shabwa province and found its mark, crashing into a small stone house on a hillside where five young men were sleeping. Half a mile away, a 27-year-old Yemeni tribesman named Ali Muhammad Ahmed was awakened by the sound. Stumbling out of bed, he quickly dressed, slung his AK-47 over his shoulder and climbed down a footpath to the valley that shelters his village, two hours from the nearest paved road. He already sensed what had happened. A week earlier, an American airstrike killed dozens of people in a neighboring province as part of an expanded campaign against Al Qaeda militants. (Although the U.S. military has acknowledged playing a role in the airstrikes, it has never publicly confirmed that it fired the missiles.)