Salon.com > Jeff Biggers

Alleged gunman’s GOP pal

Thu, 03 May 2012 01:17:00 +0000

[UPDATE BELOW]

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.

Tucson says banished books may return to classrooms

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0000

In a clarification of last Friday's announcement of a list of Mexican-American studies books to "be cleared from all classrooms" in order to comply with a state ban on ethnic studies, the Tucson Unified School District declared Tuesday that it "has not banned any books as has been widely and incorrectly reported."

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.

Who’s afraid of “The Tempest”?

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:47:00 +0000

As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books "will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage."

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.

Arizona, meet yourself

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:44:00 +0000

When folklorist James "Big Jim" Griffith launched Tucson Meet Yourself, a folk traditions festival in 1974, he sought to gather the loose ends of the burgeoning southwestern city in a celebration of its diversity and mutual interests. The downtown festival flourishes a generation later; but large parts of the greater city of Tucson, defined by many for its fraying edges of suburban desert sprawl and strip malls, have also unraveled into transient, segregated and anonymous enclaves where few people will know or ever meet each other.

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.

Sheriff Joe takes another hit

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:32:00 +0000

The clock struck at 1,095 days and 11 hours today for Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz. -- or, at least according to the ticking icon on the Phoenix New Times home page that had asked readers for years: "How long has Sheriff Joe been under investigation by the feds?"

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.

What happens in Arizona doesn’t stay in Arizona

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:30:00 +0000

MESA, Ariz. -- Almost a year to the day after he took power as the self-proclaimed "Tea Party president" and thrust Arizona's hard-line immigration and anti-federal laws into the national arena, state Senate president Russell Pearce watched in bewilderment yesterday as an extraordinary citizens campaign of Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans dethroned him in a historic recall election.

"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.

How Arizona wrote the GOP’s immigration platform

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer may have recently decided against moving the state’s Republican primary to January, but that didn’t stop her own campaign to bring Arizona back to the center of the hotly charged national debate on immigration and border security.

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.

In the 19th century, the Romneys fled the law

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:30:00 +0000

In an attempt to blunt the surging presidential candidacy of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Mitt Romney recently embraced two hot-button immigration issues in an appeal to Tea Party followers: He called for an end to so-called sanctuary cities harboring undocumented aliens, and he insisted that the next president "must do a better job of securing its borders, and as president, I will."

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."

The disturbing copy-and-paste habits of Russell Pearce

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:45:00 +0000

As President Obama and congressional leaders wrangled over the debt ceiling last Saturday evening, Russell Pearce, Arizona's controversial state Senate president, turned to Facebook to express his own personal outrage.

"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.

Blowing away King Coal

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:23:00 +0000

On Jan. 16, as Barack Obama visited a wind turbine factory in Ohio, Rory McIlmoil snaked along a muddy mountain road in West Virginia on a similar mission. He was headed up Coal River Mountain, the last mountain left untouched in a historic range ravaged by strip mining.

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.

In coal blood

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:30:00 +0000

Six coal miners have been trapped in a collapsed shaft in the Crandall Canyon coal mine in Utah since a week ago Monday. Four days after that accident, three construction workers in southwestern Indiana fell to their death in a coal mine air shaft. As the round-the-clock news coverage of the coal mining tragedy in Utah unfolds with an enduring if dwindling hope, intercut with the disquieting persona of Robert E. Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy and co-owner of the Crandall Canyon mine who has held regular press conferences, our nation has been reminded that a crisis is never a crisis in the public's eye until it is validated by disaster.

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.