By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings After more than two hours of discussion, and by a 7 – 6 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee has approved SB1611, Russell Pearce's latest effort to one-up last year's SB1070. The four Democrats on the committee, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, David Schapira, Paula Aboud, and Olivia Cajero-Bedford, were joined by Republican … Read more
By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings The Senate Appropriations hearing is underway, and I am in the overflow room (SHR1). They haven't gotten to the "good" bills yet, but here are a few pics from earlier in the day – The targets of Russell Pearce's bills… Senate hearing room cordoned off by police, who … Read more
by David Safier If you have felt the slightest bit complacent about what's going on in Arizona, two articles on the Star's front page should end that. The Star has badly mis-headed the Howard Fischer article about a whole raft of anti-immigrant legislation. Hell, let's be honest. It's anti-Hispanic legislation. It includes Pearce's Omnibus Immigration … Read more
By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings AZ Senate President Russell Pearce (R-National Alliance) is attempting to out-SB1070 last year's SB1070, the bill that became the law that both powered and rode the wave of nativist sentiment sweeping across large portions of the country (and not coincidentally, the law that the utterly unqualified Jan Brewer used to gain an … Read more
By Karl Reiner The elected leaders of Arizona continue to be extremely busy doing things that bewilder much of the citizenry. The attempt to have local law enforcement agencies take on the additional responsibility of enforcing immigration laws (the infamous SB 1070 affair) resulted in a massive amount of negative publicity financially beleaguered Arizona … Read more