Would you believe that Steven Seagal is actually not the worst choice Arpaio made?

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that Seagal's heart is in the right place, although I question whether D-List action stars from the '80s are really the right tactic. But nevertheless, with all the news of shootings, all parents worry about the safety of their children.

But I'm not sure that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is really thinking about the safety of children as much as he should. After the massacre at Sandy Hook, Arpaio's response aligned with the NRA, vowing to place his personally selected 'posse' of armed guards in Maricopa County schools. But did anyone question where he would get the candidates for this posse?

Therein lies the problem:

(T)he posse reportedly included at least one man convicted of sex crimes against children. And even worse, and what no one has apparently yet realized: The convicted child sex criminal posse member worked for Arpaio for years in the Sheriff’s office until he was arrested in 2009.

Are we to believe that Arpaio had no idea who this guy was?

Armed child-sex criminals roaming Arizona’s schools. What could possibly go wrong? What’s worse is that Arpaio has been facing heavy criticism for his alleged laxity on prosecuting sex crimes, particularly sex crimes against children.

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks, Sheriff Joe. I'd much rather have my children take the relatively rare chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a school shooting than have them be face to face daily with a known and convicted offender of child sex crimes. Americablog has the whole sordid story.

I tell you, Arpaio's recall would do more to restore justice to Arizona than any other thing.

Isn't this the cutest story you ever did hear?

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Friday responded to news that he is the target of a new recall campaign, blasting out a frantic email to his supporters asking for money to help fend off the challenge.-

"Just three weeks after I was sworn into office for a sixth term as Maricopa County Sheriff, a group of radical extremists filed a recall campaign to forcibly remove me from office," Arpaio wrote. "This is very serious."

On Wednesday, activists from the Respect Arizona coalition filed registration paperwork officially kicking off a campaign to remove the controversial sheriff from his post. While they'll need 300,000 signatures to trigger the recall election, leaders of the group have experience in the form of a successful 2011 effort to topple Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce (R), who was widely regarded as the architect of the state's highly controversial SB 1070 immigration law.

Organizers of the Arpaio recall effort erected a website that calls for a new sheriff "that respects families, respects immigrants and respects Latinos."

Arpaio has drawn national scrutiny for his harsh record on immigration enforcement, including federal allegations and other lawsuits accusing him civil rights violations and racial profiling. Complaints have also been raised over a number of deaths at his notorious jail tent cities, as well as his alleged mishandling of hundreds of sex abuse cases in Maricopa County.
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Arpaio, who crushed his opponents in 2012 by raising $8.5 million, asks for a maximum per-person contribution of $430 to help him battle back against the group, which he calls "clowns," or "small band of thugs," or "radical extremist forces."

The words 'clown', 'thug' and radical extremist go a really long way in describing the sheriff because of his long record of abuses while in office.

In a strongly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department on Thursday accused Sheriff Joe Arpaio of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest and retaliating against those who complain.

After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which Mr. Arpaio leads, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.

“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others had been interviewed as part of the review, including Sheriff Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.

Let us hope he is booted out of office as quickly as possible.

Something is rotten in the state of Arizona. And it stinks of a festering campaign to suppress the growing political power of the state's Latino population.

Because they're still counting nearly 200,000 "provisional" ballots that were handed out in massive numbers because of the large number of first-time voters whose mail-in ballots were not delivered, and others who did not receive their sample ballots, showing up on Election Day with only hats in hand -- even though they had legally registered. From the WSJ:

Arizona elections officials continued chipping away at a mountain of uncounted ballots from the Nov. 6 election, but more than 192,000 uncounted ballots remained Wednesday night, leaving results up in the air and prompting protests from the Latino community.

At least one high-profile contest remains in the balance: the closely watched congressional race between incumbent Democrat Ron Barber—the chosen successor to former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords—and Republican Martha McSally. As of Wednesday evening, 943 votes separated the candidates, with Mr. Barber ahead.

Many candidates with large leads—such as Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jeff Flake and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—have declared victory while their opponents conceded.

But state election officials cautioned that with so many uncounted ballots they couldn't confirm the outcome of any races. The state plans to release its official results Dec. 3, but "that doesn't stop candidates from declaring victory or conceding defeat," said Matthew Roberts, spokesman for the Arizona Secretary of State's office, which oversees elections.

More than 163,700 uncounted ballots are provisional ballots—meaning ballots that need to be checked for missing information, such as the voter's identity or to ensure the voter hadn't filled out two ballots, or voted at the wrong polling place. The remaining 28,550 uncounted ballots are early mail ballots.

Voters who couldn't provide identification at their polling place had until the end of Wednesday to provide it so their ballots would be counted. But groups that worked to register Latino voters in the state said they feared that some provisional ballots might not be counted if those voters weren't aware of the requirement.

You read that right: If you were handed one of these provisional ballots, you had until yesterday to get back to the courthouse and prove that you voted legitimately. If not, your vote gets tossed.

And even if you do show up and prove your vote legitimate, there's the nagging suspicion it will end up uncounted anyway:

"I think a lot of Latino votes were left out on purpose," said 18-year-old Nicolas Botello, protesting outside the Maricopa County Recorder's office Thursday night. Mr. Botello said he voted, but said he fears other voters won't be counted because they received provisional ballots that may be disqualified.

Some protesters left hand-written notes on a large cork board propped up on the sidewalk behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. One such note read: "I registered to vote but they made me cast a provisional ballot. Did it count?"

So far, Senate Democratic candidate Richard Carmona has not unconceded his race, though he is being urged to do so, since the heavy Latino count inherent in these ballots could change the outcome of his race as well.

But the Barber-McSally race is attracting the usual Republican vote-suppression tactics, as AlterNet's Laura Gottesdiener reports:

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And of course, the cowardly DoJ did a Friday afternoon news dump on a holiday weekend:

The U.S. Attorney's Office has closed its long-running abuse-of-power investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- without any charges to be filed.

In a 5 p.m. Friday news release, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Birmingham Scheel, acting on behalf of the United States Department of Justice, announced her office "is closing its investigation into allegations of criminal conduct" by current and former members of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

Federal prosecutors have advised Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery of the decision.

"I'm just pissed," said Maricopa County Supervisor Andy Kunasek. "If (former Deputy County Attorney) Lisa Aubuchon and (former Sheriff's Chief Deputy) David Hendershott are not prosecuted for perjury, then this is all about politics. This is about a Justice Department that is afraid to do their jobs."

Kunasek is referring to this.

Remember, the Obama Justice Department just brought criminal charges against a married couple for lying to get a mortgage. But that's different - moral hazard!

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Our favorite nativist nutcase in an actual position of authority, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, has been coming down off the high notes of his dramatic investigation of President Obama's birth certificate the past couple of weeks. Because he's finally on trial for his racial-profiling policies targeting Latinos in his community.

And it hasn't been much fun for him, as Ray Stern at the Phoenix New Times reports:

Under pointed questioning by Young, Arpaio denied that he equated brown-skinned people with illegal immigrants, as a press release from 2007 demonstrates he did. Young took time to go over a letter received by Arpaio from an anti-immigrant group in which Arpaio had emphasized statements about how police shouldn't be afraid to check the status of day laborers. And Young played a video from another press conference in which Arpaio said he'd have a "pure" program that went after illegal immigrants first, and their suspected crimes second.

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.

The whole week has gone like that. If his officers were provably bigoted and indulged in nakedly racist policing, why, none of that was HIS doing. He had no knowledge of such things!

As the Arizona Republic put it in an editorial:

Apologists for Arpaio must come to terms with the person they so zealously defend. Either he is America's toughest sheriff, or America's most oblivious sheriff.

Arpaio's attorneys contend that Arpaio's hermetically sealed existence in his own office is intended to avoid micromanagement of professional police work.

"It serves as an insulation against desires and impulses that might not be in the best interest of the community," said attorney Tim Casey.

That runs exactly counter to Arpaio's assertions, repeated endlessly, that his notorious, wasteful "crime-suppression sweeps" through largely Hispanic neighborhoods were conducted precisely because he deemed them in the community's best interests. The very existence of the sweeps was a political statement.

Arpaio and his acolytes either lied to the public about the purpose of those sweeps, or they are lying to the judge now.

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It was pretty comical yesterday watching Andrew Thomas, the former DA in Arizona's Maricopa County and Joe Arpaio's right-hand man in their corrupt attempts to intimidate county officials, hold his press conference denouncing the fact that he had just been disbarred for his behavior.

You see, it's all the fault of his enemies, and he's a martyr:

"I did my job. A lot of powerful people didn't like that," he said.

An Arizona ethics board disbarred Thomas Tuesday for failed corruption investigations that he and America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff launched against officials with whom they were having political and legal disputes.

"We now have a constitutional crisis in which prosecutors and members of the executive branch are being targeted by the judiciary for blowing the whistle on misconduct in the judiciary," he said.

He compared the figures behind his disbarring to corrupt Mexican officials.

"Arizona, after what happened yesterday, has become Mexico," Thomas said.

The best part, as Stephen Lemons observes:

"Other men, far greater than I, have gone to jail in defense of principles they believed in and so they would not kowtow to a corrupt ruler," Thomas said at one point. "People like Gandhi, people like Dr. King, people like Solzhenitsyn, people like Thomas More, people who stood for something....and I'm going to stand firm."

"Gandhi?" wondered one onlooker in amazement.

Yep, I could hardly believe my ears, too, as Thomas blamed his current situation on others -- a corrupt judiciary, powerful politicians, insiders who knew "how to work the system," Presiding Disciplinary Judge William O'Neil, his fellow lawyers, you name it. Anyone but himself.

Meanwhile, Joe Arpaio was whistling past Thomas' political graveyard in his noncommital remarks. Mainly because his head is next on the block:

And despite Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s efforts to distance himself from cases at the center of a legal ethics panel inquiry that cost a pair of former county prosecutors their careers — the fallout has moved closer.

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Christmas came early for the law-abiding residents of Arizona's Maricopa County yesterday:

PHOENIX — In a strongly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department on Thursday accused Sheriff Joe Arpaio of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest and retaliating against those who complain.

After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which Mr. Arpaio leads, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.

“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others had been interviewed as part of the review, including Sheriff Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.

Mr. Perez said he hoped Sheriff Arpaio would cooperate with the federal government in turning the department around. Should he refuse to enter into a court-approved settlement agreement, Mr. Perez said, the government will file a lawsuit and the department could lose millions of dollars in federal money.

A separate federal grand jury investigation of Sheriff Arpaio’s office is continuing, focusing on accusations of abuse of power by the department’s public corruption squad.

That investigation -- unlike this probe, which involved civil law -- is a criminal matter. The other shoe has yet to drop on that score.

Arpaio, of course, claims that this is all politically motivated:

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"Don't come here and use me as a whipping boy for a national, international problem," said Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The DOJ warned Arpaio to stop racially profiling Hispanic members of the community, or face the consequences. But Arpaio vowed to continue his controversial immigration sweeps.

"I took an oath of office. I'm enforcing the state and federal laws," Arpaio said.. "It's as simple as that, and I will continue to enforce those state laws."

The normally media friendly sheriff stayed away from the cameras for most of the day today. And when he did speak, it was during a late-afternoon news conference with his attorneys at his side.

"I'm going to say it again, I will continue to enforce all the laws," Arpaio said during the 40-minute news conference.

...

"President Obama and his band of his merry men might as well erect their own pink neon sign on the Arizona-Mexico border saying welcome to your United States," Arpaio said. "Our home is your home."

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Michele Bachmann said she considers Sheriff Joe Arpaio "one of my heroes" in a brief news conference the Republican presidential candidate held before meeting with the 79-year-old sheriff on Wednesday afternoon.
Bachmann spent her time with the media - it lasted less than 4 minutes - highlighting her position on immigration and getting Arizonans to understand why she considers the state an important battleground in her efforts to secure the Republican nomination.

Bachmann said solving the "border issue" is something that can be done in phases, by first increasing security along the U.S. border with Mexico and then reducing programs, such as in-state tuition for undocumented students, that can entice immigrants to remain in the country without authorization.

"I want to solve the border issue," said Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman. "I want to build the fence that needs to be built."

Bachmann also said she wants Arpaio's support.

"He's a great guy - anyone would want his endorsement," she said.

He sure is great at locking up brown people and detaining them in pseudo internment camps. Poor Gov. Jan Brewer didn't even warrant a heads up from Michele.

Her visit came as a surprise to many in local Republican and conservative circles.

"NOT good form when a presidential candidate comes to Arizona and fails to notify the state party or Governor," Shane Wikfors of the conservative blog Sonoran Alliance said Tuesday night on Twitter. In a follow-up Twitter message, Wikfors expressed dissatisfaction with the Bachmann campaign "for blowing off conservative supporters in AZ tonight!"

He did support Mittens last time so I doubt he'll give her a thumbs up endorsement, but he might giver her a tour of his detention centers.

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What do you get when you put a draft dodging, conservative 70's rock guitarist and a xenophobic and possibly corrupt Arizona sheriff? Dinner with Wingnuts. FOX Phoenix:

They come from two different worlds, but Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and rocker Ted Nugent do see eye to eye on the issue of illegal immigration.

That was a topic of discussion at a dinner date between the two Monday night.

The two see eye to eye on pretty much everything -- just two friends from two very different backgrounds, having dinner, and they let us crash the party.

Nugent is still known for his guitar playing, but these days his conservative politics are becoming just as well known. He's even a special deputy in the sheriff's office.

"He's a captain. If he does good we'll make him a colonel," chuckles Arpaio. Nugent was sworn in last year and since then the two have stayed in touch. Nugent was invited to dinner at Bobby Q's near Dunlap and I-17 in Phoenix, and he asked the sheriff to come along. So what does Nugent like so much about Sheriff Joe?

"How about truth and logic and the American way and doing the right thing whether it's politically correct or not. Getting the job done protecting the citizens and enforcing the law… what I just mentioned is all the right things and all the obvious common sense thing to do. And he is my common sense guy," he says.

Nugent has become well known for his support of gun rights and his distaste for some prominent Democrats. He's also heavily involved in the DARE program

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They may come from two different worlds which would be law enforcement and music, but they carry the same ideological background. And they both like to hunt things except Joe hunts people.

Stephen Colbert abuses Ted Nugent's last column in the Washington Times which attacks American youth and calls them 'stoned on apathy.'

: Millennials sleep as their future crumbles

While I personally condemn violence of any kind, I am stunned that they are not participating more in the Tea Party, even rioting in the streets, clashing with the cops, conducting sit-ins at their colleges, interrupting political events and so on. Instead, the young people of this generation appear to be sound asleep, lethargic and seemingly unaware of how badly their generation is being royally abused by the deep-seated corruption and abuse of power in the government. They appear to be terminally stoned on apathy.

Ted is condemning violence but is calling for riots in the streets. Shockingly, Wall Street, Banks and corporations were spared his ire. See, that's who would benefit from Nugent's riots.

Young Americans were politically naive in 1960 but at least willing to be engaged. Although I remember the various protests and marches, I was either squirrel hunting or putting a sharp edge on my sonic guitar-slaying skills, having not awakened to my “we the people” duties quite yet. Regrettably, I knew nothing about politics and, sadly, little of our nation’s history.

I lived in the 60's and 70's too and protests and riots were initiated because of the draft which forced us to be sent to Vietnam. That didn't end too well for over fifty thousand of American youths.

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Back in August of last year, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the folks from Tea Party Nation exercised their inner Nativists by holding a big rally near the border in Cochise County. What was little noted at the time was where the rally was held: On Glenn Spencer's ranch. The same ranch where, a year before, Minuteman leader Shawna Forde had been arrested for the murders of a nine-year-old girl and her father.

David Holthouse at Media Matters has the whole story -- including the big picture:

Grinning on the sidelines behind mirrored sunglasses was Glenn Spencer, the leader of the border vigilante group American Border Patrol and the owner of the Tea Party Nation rally site.

Spencer's founding of American Border Patrol in 2002 pre-dated the first Minuteman "civilian border patrols" by three years. Before his ranchland became a Tea Party rallying point it served as both meeting grounds and temporary housing for high-ranking members of various border vigilante factions. Minuteman American Defense leader Shawna Forde lived on the property in an RV owned by Spencer in the summer of 2008.

Over the past two years, more than a dozen former border vigilante leaders have taken on key roles in the Tea Party movement. Some, like Spencer, continue to maintain their hard-core nativist personas. Others have sought to separate themselves from their Minuteman identities in pursuit of mainstream political legitimacy.

Spencer's border-watching activities well predated 2002; he was actively organizing such vigilante action back in the early 1990s, when his American Patrol outfit was a player in the Patriot/militia movement, and his vicious rhetoric earned his organization a hate-group designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Spencer is no bit player in the Nativist movement. He has, in fact, been the wellspring of many of the most cherished lies about immigrants, Latinos and the immigrant-rights movement over the years, including the time he spread false rumors that immigrants were carrying the Ebola virus into the USA. Spencer is the original source of the false claim that MEChA is a racist organization, as well as the accompanying phony Reconquista! conspiracy theory.

Above all, Spencer was one of the first people organizing vigilante border patrols -- serving in many ways as the original inspiration for the Minuteman movement, and he indeed continued to play a major leadership role in the movement until its sudden demise at the hands of Shawna Forde. Her conviction in February for the murders in Arivaca signalled the death knell for a movement already on its last legs, splintering into renegade subgroups like Forde's with no accountability, no restraints, and no conscience.

These border watch groups don't call themselves "Minutemen" anymore. Now they use newer, Tea Party-friendly monikers with lots of Patriotic references.

As Holthouse explains:

"The Forde killings really made the whole movement sordid and these guys [Minuteman leaders] needed to find somewhere else for their ambitions," said Heidi Beirich, co-director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks extremist groups. "Rebranding themselves as Tea Party figures is their effort to stay relevant. They saw the rising populism as a good thing to latch onto, so they just toned down their anti-immigrant messaging a bit and synced themselves with the larger Tea Party agenda."

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