Immigration

Legislative Whirlwind Part 4: Lettuce & Birds (video)

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Lettuce in Yuma
Here we can see miles of fields of Romaine lettuce with crews of migrant workers in the distance. In the foreground are 1000s of discarded outer Romaine lettuce leaves. Workers severely trim lettuce heads down, so they can be sold as “Romaine hearts”. The leaves will be plowed back into the ground for nutrients, but still, the waste was surprise to someone like me who heard “waste not want not” many times while growing up.

During our Yuma Legislative Tour in December, we saw miles and miles of lettuce, cotton, broccoli, seed crops, and more. We got muddy and trudged around the Romaine lettuce fields with migrant workers, and we also toured a cotton gin. (More photos are here on my Facebook page.)

After our first day of touring Yuma’s agricultural areas, we heard multiple presentations at a hosted dinner paid for by different growing/ranching industry groups and served up by 4H and JTED youth. The presentation by Paul Brierley, director of the University of Arizona Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture, stuck out in my mind. He talked about using engineering technology to help growers in the Yuma area. According to the UA website, “The [Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture], based in Yuma, is a public-private partnership (PPP) between the college and the Arizona and California desert agriculture industry, dedicated to addressing ‘on-the-ground’ industry needs through collaboration and research.” The website continues on to say: “More than two dozen industry partners from Yuma and Salinas, California, have invested in the center, together committing more than $1.1 million over the next three years.”

Brierley is an affable engineer who grew up on a large farm. According to Bierley, the primary problem that industry partners wanted the PPP center to tackle was “productivity”. He talked about different ways to boost productivity by using technology. For example, Brierley said that the date palms needed help with pollination. He showed a photo of a migrant worker pollinating date trees using a machine that looked like a leaf blower strapped on his back. This human-assisted pollination worked, but to improve productivity, the UA and Yuma growers began experimenting with drones. They found that drones to be more efficient pollinators than people. Technology to the rescue: mechanical birds. (For some jobs, this is the future: people being replaced by machines.)

Another problem area that had been identified as a hindrance to productivity was birds.

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Bernie, Donald & Me: Beyond the Victory on Nov 8

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Steve Farley, Pamela Powers Hannley, Randy Friese
LD9 Senator Steve Farley, Rep.-Elect Pamela Powers Hannley and Rep. Randy Friese on Election Night.

At 5 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2016, I had an existential crisis. How could a Progressive candidate like me win election on the same day as Donald Trump?

The LD9 team won early on Nov. 8. Randy, Steve and I were the first winners to take the stage at the Pima County Democratic Party party in the Marriott Hotel, where many of us watched President Barack Obama win twice.

Excitement was in the air. Everyone was so cheery. The polls all told us that our candidate– the first woman president– would win handily. Yes, of course, one poll said that Hillary Clinton would win by only 3%, but how could that be when all other polls were so high in favor of her?

Now we all know what happened. The polls were wrong. Twenty-five years of lies; millions of social media shares of questionable meme attacks and fake news; editorializing instead of news analysis by mainstream news media; Russian hacks; dithering, drawn-out FBI investigation of those @#$% emails;  and deep-seeded sexism took down the most qualified candidate and gave us a president who promises to rule with an authoritarian hand.

So, how did I win on the same night Trump won?

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Trump immigration plan: a Muslim Registry – are internment camps to follow?

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So this actually happened last week . . . A prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump, Carl Higbie, a former spokesman for Great America PAC and a member of the Trump transition team, in an appearance on “The Kelly File” on FAUX News cited World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps as a “precedent” for an immigrant (read Muslim) registry for immigrants from countries where terrorist groups were active. Trump Camp’s Talk of Registry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslims’ Fears:

Cartoon_62“We’ve done it based on race, we’ve done it based on religion, we’ve done it based on region,” Mr. Higbie said. “We’ve done it with Iran back — back a while ago. We did it during World War II with Japanese.”

“You’re not proposing that we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope,” said Megyn Kelly, the show’s host.

Mr. Higbie, a former Navy SEAL who served two tours in Iraq, denied that, but said, “We need to protect America first.”

InternmentCampHe stood by his comments in a phone interview on Thursday morning, saying that he had been alluding to the fact that the Supreme Court had “upheld things as horrific as Japanese internment camps.”

“There is historical, factual precedent to do things that are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security,” he said, adding that he “fundamentally” disagreed with “the internment camp mantra and doing it at all.”

He clarified that he was not a constitutional lawyer and was working from a layman’s understanding of the 1944 Supreme Court ruling that the order for internment camps was constitutional. He said he hoped to be involved in the Trump administration but had engaged in no “formal conversations” with the president-elect’s team.

Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, explains to Carl Higbie and Trump supporters why the infamous case of Korematsu v. United States (1944), is not the precedent Higbie suggests. Why Korematsu Is Not a Precedent.

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DOJ files proposed criminal contempt charge against crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio

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The Department of Justice has complied with the Court’s order to file its proposed criminal contempt charge against the “most corrupt sheriff in America,” crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio. Justice Department files proposed contempt charge against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

Babeu-ArpaioActing on a judge’s request, a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor has filed a proposed order to show cause as to whether Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio should be held in criminal contempt of federal court.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton asked for the proposed order to use as a “charging document” to continue criminal proceedings against the embattled sheriff. She has yet to sign the order.

The proposed order, submitted Monday morning by DOJ attorney John Keller, accuses Arpaio of violating a December 2011 preliminary injunction to stop the Sheriff’s Office from enforcing federal civil immigration law.

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Mike Pence: ‘That Mexican Thing’

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Oh Mikey, you thought that you were being so clever. This one will come back to bite you. (Just like “taco trucks on every corner” did). ‘That Mexican Thing’ Takes On Life After the Debate: In the grand digital tradition of American political debates, the audience tends to seize upon singular phrases or gestures that, … Read more