http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0424/judge-napolitano-immigration-law-bankrupt-republican-party/
Judge Napolitano: Immigration law will ‘bankrupt the Republican Party’
Andrew McLemore
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
After Fox News analysts spent most of Friday defending Arizona's bill to target illegal immigrants, Judge Andrew Napolitano offered a different take on the controversial measure, Crooks and Liars reported.
When asked about Gov. Jan Brewer, Napolitano said her signing of the bill into law will have disastrous consequences:
Napolitano: She's gonna bankrupt the Republican Party and the state of Arizona. Look at what happened to the Republicans in California with the proposition --
Cavuto: What happens?
Napolitano: Ah, Hispanics -- who have a natural home in the Republican Party because they are socially conservative -- will flee in droves. She's also gonna bankrupt her state, because no insurance company will provide coverage for this. And for all the lawsuits that will happen -- for all the people that are wrongfully stopped -- her budget will be paying for it. Her budget will be paying the legal bills of the lawyers who sue on behalf of those that were stopped.
This will be a disaster for Arizona -- to say nothing of the fact that it's so unconstitutional that I predict a federal judge will prevent Arizona from enforcing it as soon as they attempt to do so. That will probably be tomorrow.
The new law, which will take effect in late July or early August, was cheered by many, including Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose tough crackdowns have made him a hero in the anti-illegal immigration community. He said it gives him new authority to detain undocumented migrants who aren't accused of committing any other crimes.
"Now if we show they're illegal, we can actually arrest them and put them in our jails," Arpaio said.
Critics claim the bill will effectively encourage racial profiling. President Barack Obama branded it "misguided." Hispanic groups across the country tend to agree with Napolitano's assessment of the bill.
Immigrant advocates say the bill could worsen an already tenuous relationship between law enforcement and Hispanics in Arizona.
State Sen. Rebecca Rios, a Phoenix Democrat and fourth-generation Arizonan, said she's concerned about her 14-year-old son being harassed by police because of his brown skin, black hair and dark-brown eyes.
"I don't want my son or anyone else's son targeted simply because of their physical characteristics," Rios said. "There's no reason I should have to carry around any proof of citizenship, nor my son."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Showing posts with label Joe Arpaio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Arpaio. Show all posts
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Behind the Arizona Immigration Law
The new Arizona law to require all people to carry citizenship papers is part of a long-running program of the state GOP to disenfranchise Hispanic voters.
Governor Janet Brewer, until last year Arizona's Secretary of State, zealously directed a program to block over 100,000 voters from registering without a single case proven of a non-citizen attempting to vote.
The racially-loaded electoral blockade was fiercely promoted by State Senator Russell Pearce, sponsor of the new citizenship ID law.
According to BBC reporter Greg Palast, the Arizona GOP's blockade of voters is an ill-disguised program to systematically exclude legal voters, overwhelmingly Democrats.
Palast conducted the investigation for Rolling Stone Magazine and BBC Television.
See below for Palast's latest story on the Arizona Immigration law.
For media inquiries please contact Matt Pascarella at +1 (347) 321-4616 or +1 (212) 505-5566.
Kindest regards,
Matt
For release Monday 4/26/2010
Media:
Contact Matt Pascarella: +1 (347) 321-4616
Palast office: +1 (212) 505-5566
Behind the Arizona Immigration Law:
GOP Game to Swipe the November Election
Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.
by Greg Palast
for Truthout.org
[Phoenix, AZ] Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.
I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.
What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.
What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.
Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelming Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.
So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?
No, not one.
Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?
The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western
mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."
This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.
Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.
"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.
But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.
[By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona's Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor's office.]
State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."
How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.
The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.
The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms, and alien job thieves are just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.
Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.
But what's wrong with requiring folks to prove they're American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.
According to a study by professor Matt Barreto of Washington State University, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.
Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer's or Pearce's help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters, that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her US birth certificate was nowhere to be found as it never existed.
In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County prison where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially-charged and legally suspect methods.
I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors with a big sign, "NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL." I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are illegal as they come, but Arpaio's sophisticated deportee-sniffer didn't stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.
But that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona -- after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? -- but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.
Greg Palast has investigated the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for BBC Television, Rolling Stone (with Robert Kennedy Jr.), Harper's, The Nation and Truthout.org. Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."
Governor Janet Brewer, until last year Arizona's Secretary of State, zealously directed a program to block over 100,000 voters from registering without a single case proven of a non-citizen attempting to vote.
The racially-loaded electoral blockade was fiercely promoted by State Senator Russell Pearce, sponsor of the new citizenship ID law.
According to BBC reporter Greg Palast, the Arizona GOP's blockade of voters is an ill-disguised program to systematically exclude legal voters, overwhelmingly Democrats.
Palast conducted the investigation for Rolling Stone Magazine and BBC Television.
See below for Palast's latest story on the Arizona Immigration law.
For media inquiries please contact Matt Pascarella at +1 (347) 321-4616 or +1 (212) 505-5566.
Kindest regards,
Matt
For release Monday 4/26/2010
Media:
Contact Matt Pascarella: +1 (347) 321-4616
Palast office: +1 (212) 505-5566
Behind the Arizona Immigration Law:
GOP Game to Swipe the November Election
Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.
by Greg Palast
for Truthout.org
[Phoenix, AZ] Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.
I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.
What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.
What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.
In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.
Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelming Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.
That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.
So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?
No, not one.
Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?
The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western
mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."
This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.
Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.
"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.
But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.
[By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona's Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor's office.]
State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."
How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.
The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.
The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms, and alien job thieves are just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.
Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.
But what's wrong with requiring folks to prove they're American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.
According to a study by professor Matt Barreto of Washington State University, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.
Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer's or Pearce's help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters, that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her US birth certificate was nowhere to be found as it never existed.
In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County prison where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially-charged and legally suspect methods.
I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors with a big sign, "NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL." I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are illegal as they come, but Arpaio's sophisticated deportee-sniffer didn't stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.
But that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona -- after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? -- but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.
Greg Palast has investigated the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for BBC Television, Rolling Stone (with Robert Kennedy Jr.), Harper's, The Nation and Truthout.org. Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Charles Barkley and Sheriff Joe's Special Treatment
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/zirin
Charles Barkley and Sheriff Joe's Special Treatment
Southpaw
By Dave Zirin
March 12, 2009
If you tuned into CNN last weekend, you may have seen a press conference with NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley and a plump, hatchet-faced lawman who calls himself "the toughest sheriff in America," Joe Arpaio. You may have caught Sheriff Joe making clear with a feral smile that no, Barkley would not be required to "wear the pink underwear." It was American law enforcement at its ugliest.
Barkley, the fast-living, big-drinking, loud-talking NBA player turned commentator, was pulled over on December 31 for driving while intoxicated. The former hoops superstar was fined $2,000, sentenced to an alcohol treatment program and ordered to install an ignition interlock device on his cars. He also had to spend three days at Sheriff Joe's notorious Tent City prison. Barkley's experience was hardly typical for Tent City. He was given his own tent, where he could eat meals in privacy. He wasn't served food surplus like the prison's infamous green bologna for meals. He didn't have to listen to the prison radio station, KJOE, which plays all of Sheriff Joe's favorite hits. He could wear a red Nike tracksuit instead of the prison jumpsuit. He also participated in the press conference where Arpaio plugged his book, America's Toughest Sheriff: How We Can Win the War Against Crime.
And, as mentioned, he didn't have to wear the pink underwear Sheriff Joe favors for those under his thumb. But there was even more "Chuck" didn't have to do as a resident of Tent City.
Sheriff Joe doesn't only enjoy the thrill of knowing that his prisoners are pretty in pink. He has been known to parade the undocumented immigrants among them in shackles, wearing only their state-supplied pink underwear in front of a bevy of armed guards and a gaggle of television cameras. The mainstream media didn't travel into the dry desert heat to expose Sheriff Joe's tactics. They came because they received the press release, written by Sheriff Joe himself. In one of Sheriff Joe's "advisories," he made note of the state-of-the-art electric fence, promising that it would give "quite a shock--literally" to any escapees.
The Tent City also subjects the underwear-clad prisoners to the crushing Arizona heat, something Barkley, who was on "work release" from 8 am to 8 pm, was able to avoid. It can get blisteringly hot. Sheriff Joe's response to safety concerns was to say, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents, and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths." This attitude is the reason why Maricopa County has had to pay out $43 million under Sheriff Joe's leadership in wrongful death and injury cases.
But not everyone has the resources to issue lawsuits. Sheriff Joe, a man with his own reality program and his own "civilian posse," has made a national name for himself by being on the front lines of attacks on undocumented immigrants. Sheriff Joe's methods have led the Justice Department to announce on Wednesday that it is investigating his department for "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures." The Arizona Republic reports that David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, believes it is the department's first civil rights probe related to immigration enforcement.
Not surprisingly, Sheriff Joe justifies his treatment of immigrants on the most racist and intellectually specious grounds. He says that the Tent City is "a financially responsible alternative to taxpayers already overburdened by the economic drain imposed by a growing number of illegal aliens on social services like education and healthcare." This blithely ignores the fact that undocumented workers actually put more back into the economy than they extract, since they pay into Social Security and payroll taxes without getting anything back.
Barkley was shielded from the true ugliness of Sheriff Joe. But now that he is out of prison, the Arizona resident should do what he does best and speak his mind. Make no mistake, Barkley would have something to say.
There was a time when Barkley was a proud Republican and entertained the idea of running for governor of Alabama. In fact, when Sheriff Joe's book came out in 1996, the blurbs on the back cover included praise from Rush Limbaugh, John McCain and, yes, Charles Barkley. But since those days, Barkley has undergone a transformation. He now says Republicans have "lost their minds." Last summer Barkley said, "What do the Republicans run on? Against gay marriage and for a war that makes no sense. A war that was based on faulty intelligence. That's all they ever talk about. That and immigration. Another discriminatory argument for political gain."
Barkley most likely understands that anti-immigrant policies are discriminatory nonsense, that the politics of poverty are critical in the United States and that there is more to life than material gain. Now that he is away from the watchful eye of Sheriff Joe, it's time for Barkley to apply those principles and call for the closing of Tent City, the removal of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the end of criminalizing the undocumented as a spectator sport.
About Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and the forthcoming A People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated.com, New York Newsday and The Progressive. He is the host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio.
Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Charles Barkley and Sheriff Joe's Special Treatment
Southpaw
By Dave Zirin
March 12, 2009
If you tuned into CNN last weekend, you may have seen a press conference with NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley and a plump, hatchet-faced lawman who calls himself "the toughest sheriff in America," Joe Arpaio. You may have caught Sheriff Joe making clear with a feral smile that no, Barkley would not be required to "wear the pink underwear." It was American law enforcement at its ugliest.
Barkley, the fast-living, big-drinking, loud-talking NBA player turned commentator, was pulled over on December 31 for driving while intoxicated. The former hoops superstar was fined $2,000, sentenced to an alcohol treatment program and ordered to install an ignition interlock device on his cars. He also had to spend three days at Sheriff Joe's notorious Tent City prison. Barkley's experience was hardly typical for Tent City. He was given his own tent, where he could eat meals in privacy. He wasn't served food surplus like the prison's infamous green bologna for meals. He didn't have to listen to the prison radio station, KJOE, which plays all of Sheriff Joe's favorite hits. He could wear a red Nike tracksuit instead of the prison jumpsuit. He also participated in the press conference where Arpaio plugged his book, America's Toughest Sheriff: How We Can Win the War Against Crime.
And, as mentioned, he didn't have to wear the pink underwear Sheriff Joe favors for those under his thumb. But there was even more "Chuck" didn't have to do as a resident of Tent City.
Sheriff Joe doesn't only enjoy the thrill of knowing that his prisoners are pretty in pink. He has been known to parade the undocumented immigrants among them in shackles, wearing only their state-supplied pink underwear in front of a bevy of armed guards and a gaggle of television cameras. The mainstream media didn't travel into the dry desert heat to expose Sheriff Joe's tactics. They came because they received the press release, written by Sheriff Joe himself. In one of Sheriff Joe's "advisories," he made note of the state-of-the-art electric fence, promising that it would give "quite a shock--literally" to any escapees.
The Tent City also subjects the underwear-clad prisoners to the crushing Arizona heat, something Barkley, who was on "work release" from 8 am to 8 pm, was able to avoid. It can get blisteringly hot. Sheriff Joe's response to safety concerns was to say, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents, and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths." This attitude is the reason why Maricopa County has had to pay out $43 million under Sheriff Joe's leadership in wrongful death and injury cases.
But not everyone has the resources to issue lawsuits. Sheriff Joe, a man with his own reality program and his own "civilian posse," has made a national name for himself by being on the front lines of attacks on undocumented immigrants. Sheriff Joe's methods have led the Justice Department to announce on Wednesday that it is investigating his department for "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures." The Arizona Republic reports that David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, believes it is the department's first civil rights probe related to immigration enforcement.
Not surprisingly, Sheriff Joe justifies his treatment of immigrants on the most racist and intellectually specious grounds. He says that the Tent City is "a financially responsible alternative to taxpayers already overburdened by the economic drain imposed by a growing number of illegal aliens on social services like education and healthcare." This blithely ignores the fact that undocumented workers actually put more back into the economy than they extract, since they pay into Social Security and payroll taxes without getting anything back.
Barkley was shielded from the true ugliness of Sheriff Joe. But now that he is out of prison, the Arizona resident should do what he does best and speak his mind. Make no mistake, Barkley would have something to say.
There was a time when Barkley was a proud Republican and entertained the idea of running for governor of Alabama. In fact, when Sheriff Joe's book came out in 1996, the blurbs on the back cover included praise from Rush Limbaugh, John McCain and, yes, Charles Barkley. But since those days, Barkley has undergone a transformation. He now says Republicans have "lost their minds." Last summer Barkley said, "What do the Republicans run on? Against gay marriage and for a war that makes no sense. A war that was based on faulty intelligence. That's all they ever talk about. That and immigration. Another discriminatory argument for political gain."
Barkley most likely understands that anti-immigrant policies are discriminatory nonsense, that the politics of poverty are critical in the United States and that there is more to life than material gain. Now that he is away from the watchful eye of Sheriff Joe, it's time for Barkley to apply those principles and call for the closing of Tent City, the removal of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the end of criminalizing the undocumented as a spectator sport.
About Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and the forthcoming A People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated.com, New York Newsday and The Progressive. He is the host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio.
Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
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