With state coal production soaring against national trends, Illinois cemented its reputation as the worst rogue state for coal operations last Friday, when the rubber-stamping operations of the state's EPA issued a pollutant discharge permit to a company already cited by the state for over 600 toxic discharge violations at its central Illinois non-union strip mine.

Translation: Imagine the Department of Motor Vehicles renewing the driver's license of a toxic-laden truck driver with 600 DUI's.

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Establishing the Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability, Parraz and his supporters appealed to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to address Arpaio’s 20-year reign of fear and clampdown. Over several months, Parraz’s group filed petitions and complaints, and turned out in scores at board meetings, but never managed to nudge the equivocating board into action.

And perhaps for good reason. Arpaio had teamed up with disgraced Maricopa County attorney Andrew Thomas to launch a bizarre witch hunt against county employees and supervisors who had questioned his reign of terror. It took years and a few destroyed careers before Thomas was finally called before an ethics hearing and tried for fraud and dishonest conduct in filing frivolous criminal and civil cases to harass his rivals, and disbarred from the courtroom.

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Perhaps someone needs to inform the Republican convention: Russell Pearce has left the building.

"In less than one year, Russell Pearce has gone from being the most powerful politician in the state to being unemployed," said Randy Parraz, whose Citizens for a Better Arizona organization led last year's recall election of the former state senate president and played a key role in getting out voters in yesterday's primary election. "Not only did Pearce lose the historic recall election, he just lost the Republican primary by double digits. Russell Pearce's brand of extreme, divisive and hateful politics is finally over."

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But there's more: This was the third time such an incident has happened to Castro, who was elected in 1974 as the first (and only) Mexican American governor of Arizona.

"I've worked on immigration matters all of my life, as an ambassador, a governor and on the border," Castro told me in a phone interview from his home in Nogales, Ariz. "But this was really bad judgment."

An outspoken opponent to Arizona's controversial SB 1070 "papers please" law,  Castro recalled the other two times he had to fend off stumbling Border Patrol efforts.

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Less than a month after Russell Pearce crowed at a Gilbert, Ariz., Tea Party meeting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's "immigration policy is identical to mine" -- a brash claim that Republican operatives scrambled to explain -- the self-proclaimed Tea Party president and architect of Arizona's punitive immigration law might now be scrambling himself. Pearce has previously praised J.T. Ready, the alleged gunman in Wednesday's  tragic killing of five people in the same Phoenix suburb.

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Salon reported last week that TUSD had  "banned" seven textbooks and forbidden the teaching of  Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" in Mexican-American literature classes, a story that was picked up by two Arizona newspapers as well as Democracy Now radio program.

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Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson's largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies.

The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old textbook "Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years," which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko.  Recipient of a Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of the ethnic studies program.

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In 2009, a study commissioned by the Center for the Future of Arizona found that only 12 percent of surveyed residents in the state agreed that "people in our communities care about each other."That all changed, at least for a while, on January 8th, 2011, when 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner stepped out of a taxi in front of a Safeway supermarket on the northwest suburban edge of the city and unloaded an estimated 32-rounds of bullets from an extended magazine clip once banned under the Violent Crime and Control Law Enforcement Act.  The story of his derangement is well known now.  His target was 41-year-old US Rep. Gabby Giffords, who he managed to shoot in the head; Loughner killed six people and injured 18 other citizens before he was wrestled to the ground and disarmed.

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That investigation culminated Thursday when the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released its long-awaited report, which found a "chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations" in Arpaio's office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and over 400 interviews with sheriff's department personnel, inmates and experts, the report documented "a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,"  resulting in gross violations of  constitutional rights.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday's press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012,  to accept DOJ's measures to take "clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days," or face a lawsuit.  Perez expressed DOJ's willingness "to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO," adding, "if the will exists" on Arpaio's end.

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"Today marks the beginning of a new era in Arizona politics," declared Randy Parraz, the co-founder of the Citizens for a Better Arizona, which spearheaded the recall campaign to great derision last January. "The reign of Senate president Russell Pearce has finally come to an end."

As the darling of the right-wing  American Legislative Exchange Council and an influential ideologue in the nativist-tinged anti-immigrant movement, however, Pearce is not the only loser in the election upset.  With more than 90 percent of his campaign funds coming from corporate lobbyists and out-of-district contributions, allowing him to vastly outspend his opponent, Pearce lost by a nearly 10 percent margin -- 53.4 percent to 45.3 percent -- to Republican newcomer Jerry Lewis, a moderate Mormon leader who largely ran his grass-roots campaign as a referendum on Pearce's extremist views.

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Kicking off her book tour with a sneak preview in Alabama last Friday, in homage to that state’s controversial crackdown on immigrant schoolchildren and workers, Brewer set out the two main themes of her impassioned new book, "Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politics to Secure America's Borders." She said, "We are under siege. And we have been totally disrespected by the federal government."

Brewer makes it clear from the first line that it is not really "we," as in the collective Arizona populace, but she who has been unfairly treated by the "liberal" media and President Obama, in particular, in the aftermath of Arizona's defiant legislative act. She so identities herself with the state that she writes at one point, "Kind of like me.  Kind of like Arizona." The substantial portion of the state that is not like Brewer is what torments her.

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Yet, Romney's hard-line rhetoric overshadows a family secret: Few have benefited more from porous borders and "sanctuary" cities on either side of the border than the Romney family.

Last week, in fact, both Perry and Romney put in well-covered calls to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for advice on the immigration issue. In the 19th century, Arpaio would have been taking a close look at the Romney's familial flouting of Arizona law.

Romney's ancestral legacy of polygamy, of course, is hardly news. The Washington Post did a feature story last month on Romney's sizable family community in northern Mexico, and the role of his great-grandfather Miles Park Romney, "who came to the Chihuahua desert in 1885 seeking refuge from U.S. anti-polygamy laws."

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"Folks," he wrote, "if there was ever an argument for NO to raising the debt limit and YES to stop the reckless socialist spending in this Gangster Government in DC. Watch this video."

The video showed an "Elaborate Welfare Housing Project" built for "illegal immigrants" and funded through alleged "refugee pay."

Just one problem: The five-month-old viral video -- which was created by a far-right gadfly from Tacoma, Wash. -- had already been thoroughly debunked by the Tacoma News Tribune. By Sunday morning, Pearce had deleted the post from his Facebook site.

But this was hardly the first time that Pearce, whose ultraconservative immigration views have won him national attention and who will face a historic recall election in his Arizona district on Nov. 8, associates himself with the work of a fringe character.

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On a ridge, the 28-year-old activist brought his four-wheeler to a skid. He couldn't believe what he saw. Bulldozers had begun clearing the site for the first phase of a mountaintop removal operation, a radical strip-mining process that would clear-cut 6,600 acres of hardwood trees, detonate thousands of tons of explosives and topple the mountain range into the valley. A 100-foot swath of forest just below the ridge lay like an open wound.

For McIlmoil, this should have been ground zero in Obama's green recovery plan. Not a future wasteland.

Just last spring, McIlmoil had climbed this same ridge, looked out over a breathtaking quilt of lush forests, and envisioned an industrial wind farm. With boundless enthusiasm for alternative energy, he soon began to draft a proposal. As the year wore on, he showed, here in the deep heart of coal country, that a row of whirling wind turbines could produce enough megawatts to serve the entire region, provide hundreds of clean energy jobs and generate significantly more tax revenues than the mountaintop removal operation.

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No one knows this better than the coal miners and the community in Sago, W.Va., where 12 miners lost their lives in January 2006. They were some of the recent ones, joining the legions of nameless and otherwise forgotten coal miners and mining communities across the country, which have lost so many of their own over the decades.

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