20 Years in Arizona

Today marks the day 20 years ago in 1993 when I officially moved to Phoenix.  I've written about my "Arizona-versary" several times in this blog so I won't go over things that I've already talked about, but it is somewhat of a milestone.  Just short of one-third of my whole life I have lived here, and in spite of being born in Pennsylvania, I consider Arizona my home.

I have always loved the desert, even as a little kid when the only desert I saw was on our black-and-white TV.   Something about the dramatic starkness and the beautiful barrenness of the land spoke to me, and I was always mesmerized by the craggy, windswept mountains and vast expanse of sun-baked earth.  Where a lot of my peers saw nothing but brutal desolation and debilitating emptiness, I saw life, history, color, art and intricate, ageless patterns and rhythms.  This is a land that holds more ghosts than people, and the footfalls and songs of countless previous generations echo down the canyons of time right to the present day.  The desert might appear to be a lonely place, but you are never alone here.  Wherever you go, spirits walk with you.  Monument Valley, in far northeastern Arizona, is one of those places where the veil between the temporal world and the spirit world is especially thin.

Arizona is a place where cultures collide, intersect, conflict, separate and come together again, over and over.  Cultures such as the Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo have mixed uneasily at times but have still melded together to form a uniquely colorful and vibrant pastiche.  A fine example of this is the church at San Xavier del Bac, in southern Arizona.  Known as the White Dove of the Desert, it rises in hallucinatory splendor from the shimmering, heat-blasted expanse of ochre- and olive-colored desert near Tucson.

It seems, though, as time goes on the various cultures who make up this land are increasingly at odds with each other. Discrimination and bigotry are rampant in Arizona, particularly against Native Americans and Mexicans who have lived in this area for a very long time.  A lot of those doing the discrimination are people who have moved here from somewhere else, and really have no claim on the land or any of its residents.  I guess Anglos have a way of doing that, moving into a land and then taking it over and appropriating its culture as their own, making aboriginal residents feel like outsiders and trespassers.  They did that with rock and roll music of the 50s, when black gospel and rhythm-and-blues music were co-opted and taken over by white artists like Elvis Presley and thus made palatable to the presiding (white) culture, who milked it for as much money as they could get out of it.  They took everything, and gave nothing back in return.

The Anglo culture has been dominant here for a long time, but that is coming to an end. The increasing Hispanic population fairly guarantees that the white population of Arizona will become a minority, as early as 2025. What that will do to this state, its culture and its population cannot be reliably foreseen, but it will be amazing and fascinating, and it will blaze a trail to a new reality and a new state.  Maybe Arizona, as it rushes into the future, will find that it more closely resembles the Arizona of 100 years ago than anything else.

I feel that I have carved myself out a really good life here in Arizona.  I have a home which I dearly love.  Buying this house was one of the best things I've ever done, and it is a place where I feel perfectly safe, secure and satisfied, and where I can enjoy my beloved rabbits in peace.  I have made many wonderful, faithful friends who I value very highly, and a new chosen family in Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue. I've been a volunteer with BHRR for going on 13 years and it has made a huge, incalculable difference in my life.  BHRR is also one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and I feel that I have gained much, much more than I have given.

The yearly parade of what passes for seasons here in the Phoenix area never ceases to fascinate me, and a beautiful desert sunrise can still imbue me with an awe and an appreciation every bit as strong as the first time I witnessed one.  The cranberry-colored clouds of a December sunset can fill my mind with a beauty and serenity unsurpassed by any other.   The summer monsoon can set the sky ablaze and turn the evening twilight into a living painting of the most amazing and intricate textures and colors.  And most certainly, a clear nighttime sky far away from the lights of the city is absolutely one of the most mind-blowing and awe-inspiring things I have ever witnessed in my life.  The sheer number of stars you can see defies comprehension and is a treasure beyond any valuation, and far beyond my ability to adequately describe.

The vast diversity of the land and the eternally-changing tapestry of the sky turns this state into an artist's-canvas of the soul, a multifaceted prism which shows you many, many different, new sides and angles of something you have seen dozens of time.  The desert renews and reinvents itself constantly, but in very subtle ways and if you don't tune your mind to these changes, you will most likely miss them.

But, all things have a beginning and an end, and I am starting to get a bit restless.  I find the right-wing, ultra-conservative politics of this state to be destructive, suffocating and toxic.  Too often these days conservatism is just a convenient cover for racism, homophobia, religious intolerance and bigotry.  American politics is fracturing along many different fault lines, not only by political orientation but also racial, economic, gender and class lines, to name a few.  People are much less inclined to open their eyes and their minds to new outlooks and opinions, and many of them opt to shut out any voices which are different from their own.  They choose to not make an effort to understand what their neighbor is saying to them, and prefer instead to surround themselves only with others who share their narrow views.  Understanding different points of view takes a little effort and so many people in this state are very disinclined to do to make that effort.

So, I am starting to look elsewhere to live, most probably out of Arizona.  I'm looking toward New Mexico or Oregon/Washington state.  I have no concrete plans as of yet, but this is how things happen in my life.  There will be a slow, almost imperceptible change in me and eventually, when the time is right, I will leave Arizona and move on to the next adventure in my life.

There will come a time when I will have no more Arizona-versaries, but I will always have memories of the great times and unrelenting beauty of my desert home.

Hell On Earth Weekend 2013

Oh my my my I have been such a bad person, ignoring my blog like this.  I really love writing my blog but I go through phases where I just don't have the motivation to write. It's been three months since my last post, and I said I wouldn't let months go by without posting.  Oh well enough with the recrimination.  I'm here now and I'm ready to WRITE!

Just got through Hell on Earth Weekend, which is what I call the weekend right before July 4th.  And it really lived up to its name.  Friday and Saturday the temps rocketed up to 118 degree territory.  The very air seemed to be burning, and you can tell when it gets above, say, 115 because you notice how hot the air is when you breathe.  I don't know what's going on or why there's any reason why it has to be so hot.  But even at 10pm it was still 100 degrees outside.  This is such a strange place where I live.

I keep thinking more and more that I have to get out of Phoenix and get away from these horrible, awful, miserable summers.  I was sick and tired of the heat three weeks ago, and there's still at least three, and more likely three and a half more months of this crap to get through.  It seems the air conditioner runs all the time, valiantly waging a war against the blistering heat outside, doing its best to maintain as much of a difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures as possible.  It wouldn't be so bad if it cooled off during the night, but summer low temps are almost never under 80 degrees, and more often in the upper 80s or low 90s.  That makes for a nasty climate where the heat is unrelenting and constant.  And debilitating of mind and spirit.

When I first moved here 20 years ago I loved the heat; I thrived on it.  Maybe it was moving from the San Francisco Bay Area where the marine fog layer was often an enemy, a spoiler.  Many times I would awake on a clear morning anticipating a day at the beach, and I would begin the drive out there and it was beautiful and sunny but one mile away from the coast the gray clouds started spreading out in front of me.  When I got to the beach itself it was gray and overcast and windy and cool.  Some of my fondest memories of the Bay Area were the days I spent at the beach.  The days when there was an offshore breeze and all the fog got pushed way out over the ocean, the beaches were spectacularly beautiful.  The sky was a crystalline blue and the air felt so very fresh and clean.  I would get to the beach at 10am and stay till 6pm, broiling constantly in the sun.  I know now that was not a smart thing to do, skin-cancer-wise, but I would not trade that experience for anything in the world.  I felt so perfectly happy and content, surrounded by a world of unbelievable beauty at the beach on those crystal-clear, perfect days.  I didn't want to be anywhere else and never wanted it to end.  It truly was a paradise on earth.

There are great days here in Arizona, mostly in the fall, winter and early spring.  I find I function much better in the cooler weather.  I feel more energized and excited to do things.  When it's so hot that you end up sweltering in your own home, even minor chores like cleaning are a real pain in the butt.  I hate the fact that the hot weather is so horrible outside that you spend way too much time indoors.  It's just the reverse of when I was a child.  The wintertime was when you hibernated, stayed indoors because it was so nasty and cold outside.  Here, you hibernate during the summer, when it's disgustingly hot outside.

I used to love living here, but the political climate in this state is so vile and hateful I can't stand it anymore.  There are so many hate-filled conservatives here, and they are some of the most ignorant and uneducated people I have ever encountered.  The state legislature has some of the the most repugnant excuses for human beings that ever befouled a voting booth.  There are also more burned-out meth heads and white-trash dirtbags than I'd ever believed possible.  Racism is absolutely rampant in this state and runs wide and deep - racism against Mexicans, native Americans, gay people.  There are dimwitted, bigoted, fundamentalist Christians who are totally delusional in their Bronze-Age beliefs and superstitions, and robotic, insular Mormons who try so very hard to conceal their virulent bigotry and prejudices with their thin, studied smiles and carefully chosen words.

The question is, where would I go if I moved?  I like Payson, about an hour and a half northeast of Phoenix.  There, up on the Mogollon Rim, they actually have seasons and the occasional covering of snow.  But it's still Arizona, and everything that goes along with it.  I don't want to move back to California, since my love-hate relationship with that state still hasn't resolved itself.  You need a lot of money to live there, and I'm not sure it's worth it.

That leaves moving out of state, and possible places are northern New Mexico, north of Albuquerque and south of Taos.  I would consider Oregon or Washington State, too.  Colorado would be nice but the winters can be very harsh, and I don't want to get into a reverse-situation like I have now.

So, with the twentieth anniversary of my move to Phoenix (July 31, 1993) coming soon, I am looking to move again.  I am forming a five-year plan to be out of here, and on to my next adventure in life.

My Excellent Lobbying Adventure

Last Wednesday I went to the AZ state capitol here in Phoenix to participate in the AZ Humane Lobby Day, sponsored by the ASPCA and the Humane Society of the US.

Despite living in Phoenix for nearly 20 years, it was my first trip to the state capitol, actually located only about 10 miles from where I live.  It was an interesting, eye-opening experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Arizona State Capitol building

(Click on the pictures to view them full size)

There were about 120 people attending, representing 23 of the 30 state legislative districts.  We met in the Old Senate chambers and discussed the three bills we were there to lobby.  They are:

1) Animal Fighting as Racketeering - would classify any kind of animal fighting as a racketeering activity, opening the door to easier prosecution and stiffer penalties.
2) Prohibiting the Roadside Sale of animals - Already banned in Maricopa and Pinal counties, this law would prohibit animals being sold on the side of the road statewide
3) Prohibiting Live Animals being given away as prizes - this law would prohibit statewide the heinous, loathsome activity of giving away live baby bunnies and other animals as prizes at carnivals, events, etc. to idiots who have no clue or desire to care for them properly.

All 3 bills are working their way through committees, and we are hopeful they all will be passed through.  Then of course they have to be voted on by both legislative bodies and signed by the Governor, and there are many ways the measures can be derailed and killed, but we are hopeful they will become law.

Arizona House of Representatives, meeting in session

All us lobbyists were scheduled to meet with our three legislators, 2 representatives and 1 senator.  Our two representatives were busy running all over the place doing other things, but we did meet with our state senator, Ms. Katie Hobbs, and she was extremely nice and supportive of our efforts and the causes we were advocating.

Needless to say, I took each and every opportunity to mention the plight of rabbits in the context of all three bills, especially the carnival prize one, because it's so easy just to focus on dogs and cats.  While that is indeed worthy and necessary, I was not about to let bunnies get pushed into the background and given the short shrift.

There was a lot of legwork, running between the state House and Senate buildings, and a little bit of chaos as we tried valiantly to meet with our representatives, but in the end we met with one rep's staffer, and for the other one we only dropped off materials for them to review, but I believe we got our message to them.

While lobbying, I got a chance to visit the Arizona Capitol Museum in the Capitol building, with its graceful, colorful dome:

Also, there was a model of a very interesting design by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright for a new capitol area, created in the 1950's but never built:

I had a really good time at my first try at political lobbying, and I think I may have somewhat of a knack for it.  I would love to do more and I'm sure I'll be participating in the next Humane Lobby Day.  I will use each and every opportunity to bring awareness and raise consciousness of the treatment of rabbits in this state.  I consider it an honor to raise my voice for those who can't speak.

Election 2012 Wrap-Up

Election 2012 is now history, and what a historic night it was.  Barack Obama was given four more years to continue his leadership and his efforts to repair the economy after the 2008-2009 collapse.  We can look forward with great satisfaction for continued health care reform and one, maybe two, Supreme Court appointments, which is a huge, huge deal.  The news media were all predicting that the presidential election would be a nail-biter clear into the next morning, but in fact the election was called for Obama shortly after 9pm.  When Ohio was seen going to the president, it was all over.  To no one's surprise, Florida is still undecided because it seems as if it's impossible for them to have an election without a lot of fuss and hoo-hah and delay.  Florida is the Drama Queen of the nation.

A number of other regional races took on national significance, and a lot of them did go the right way.  Elizabeth Warren, a very capable, intelligent and resourceful woman, took the Massachusetts Senate seat away from empty mannequin Scott Brown.  Drooling, knuckle-dragging religious bigots Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who gained national infamy with their astonishingly ignorant opinions on rape and abortion, went down in flames, and deservedly so.

In non-office related elections, three states - Maryland, Maine and Washington - approved marriage equality, and another state, Minnesota, turned down an initiative to ban it.  All wonderful news, and milestones in what I believe is the inevitable march toward full marriage equality, something that absolutely should be a basic American right.  Also the first openly gay Senator was named, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.  In Illinois, Tammy Duckworth ousted loathsome dirtbag Joe Walsh.

As always there were disappointments, and not surprisingly a lot were in Arizona.  This benighted, ignorant state chose greasy, buck-toothed scam artist Jeff Flake for the Senate seat occupied by the flabby, flatulent Jon Kyl.  Ancient, bloated media whore Joe Arpaio was reelected Maricopa country sheriff for the hundredth time, thanks to all the senile old fools in Surprise and Sun City, all the anti-immigrant bigots and literally millions of dollars which poured into Arpaio's campaign coffer from out-of-state right-wing PACs, who seem to see Arpaio as a conservative (read: racist) icon.  Still undecided is the contest for new Congressional District 9, where I live, and I'm hoping Kyrsten Sinema will pull off a win over perennial Uncle Tom, Vernon Parker.  I'm also hoping for Anne Kirkpatrick to win over payday-loan-pimp Jonathan Paton in District 1.  And late today, Anne Kirkpatrick was declared victorious in her contest.

Also very much on the plus side is that AZ Proposition 204, which would have permanently extended the 1% sales tax, went down in flames with 65% of voters saying no.  This tax was passed a couple of years ago on the promise that it was only to be a temporary increase, and greedy special interests in this state thought it would be easy to make permanent.  They thought that people would go for anything that nominally was portrayed as helping school children, but voters in this state weren't snookered by this charade and rightfully told them to go pound salt.  Also, Proposition 120 the "sovereignty" amendment, a ridiculously blatant and stupid attempt by the state legislature to take control of public lands, also went down very decisively.  So, there was a little bit to be thankful for in this wretched excuse for a state.

There were some really funny things that happened last night.  Apparently Fox News - Stupid News For Stupid People - was one of the first outlets to declare Obama the winner.  One of their commentators, the execrable Karl Rove, went completely batshit crazy ON AIR, frenetically blathering about and trying to grasp any kind of straw, real or imagined, to deny the outcome in Ohio.  He looked like a gigantic, bug-eyed catfish who was yanked out of the water and was gasping and thrashing around.  Then, one of Fox's newsskanks trotted off stage and stumbled back into their "Decision Room" to confront the number-crunchers with the news that Karl Rove did not approve of their pronouncement.  The number geeks practically told her to GTFO, because numbers, unlike everyone on Fox News, do not lie.  Ohio was definitely Obama country.

But to me the most amazing and inspiring thing was that despite everything the Republicans tied to do to steal this election - lies, misinformation, voter suppression and intimidation, pathetic, un-American attempts to restrict poll hours or early voting times - everything they tried to do was to absolutely no avail.  Most amazing were the American voters who stood in line for an extraordinarily, unbelievably long time (as long as seven hours in some cases) but would not be deterred by Republican skullduggery and dirty tricks.  They were going to cast their ballots and would not be denied, and as a result, democracy itself would not be denied.

Political pundits are already furiously dissecting all of last night's happenings and assigning blame and credit as they see appropriate.  In my opinion, the Republicans lost the presidential election for two reasons:  1) a pair of profoundly unattractive candidates at the top - Romney and Ryan; and 2) a party which has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing extremists who made the party very unappealing to the more moderate American electorate.  The Republicans thought this election was going to be a cakewalk - they just had to repeat the word "economy" over and over like a mantra and the voters would flock to them - but much to their dismay that did not happen.

Complicating matters for them was that Romney was such a repellent, off-putting candidate who was his own worst enemy.  His infamous "47%" remarks kind of scuttled his candidacy at a crucial point, and his own chronic, incurable awkwardness and creepiness turned many voters off, even on a subconscious level.  Scrawny, big-eared geek Paul Ryan did not really help much.  It seems the Republicans have a really amazing talent in picking very unattractive, unappealing candidates for their elections.  They did so in 2008 and thoughtfully repeated the same mistake in 2012, and for that I thank them very much.

Everyone, including me, was fretting about the unprecedented flood of anonymous, untraceable money that was poured into the process by the horrendous Citizens' United Supreme Court ruling, but much to my surprise, American voters - not known for being particularly discerning or resistant to idiotic campaign rhetoric - were not swayed by sham super-PACs with lofty, misleading names like "Americans For Prosperity" (because who in their right mind would be against prosperous Americans?) and "Club For Growth Action" (whatever the hell that means).  Quite a few super-wealthy billionaires - casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, for one - dropped a huge chunk of change on Romney's campaign, and essentially threw their money down a rat hole.  I wonder how much good that money could have done, donated to food banks or domestic violence shelters, instead of being utterly wasted on a political campaign.

By Anne Romney's own statement, she and her husband are through with politics.  We can only hope we've seen that last of that corrosive, elitist, hatchet-faced old trollop.  Initially her role in her husband's campaign was to "humanize" him to the voters and make him seem like a regular person.  In the end, Anne Romney was the one who needed "humanized," because her presence and role in the campaign proved to be a major misfire.  She needs to just throw on one of her pioneer smocks and go be a good little Mormon wifey.  It's hard to humanize someone who lacks so very much in terms of basic humanity, and maybe her next dancing horse can do a little jig to make her feel better.

America dodged a huge bullet (more like a thermonuclear warhead) when Romney lost.  I can barely imagine how unspeakably awful and horrible a Romney administration would be.  Our nation would have become a weird, Frankenstein-like hybrid of theocracy and oligarchy, with government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich becoming the norm.

If I can be indulged for a little bit of tooting my own horn, I wrote in an entry on this blog called "This Just In: Time Marches On," dated almost a year ago November 15, 2011:

"My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election....Obama will coast to his second term."

If you don't mind my saying...  Nailed. It.

Four Weeks

It's now four weeks until the 2012 elections, and things are going just about as expected; that is, chaotic, mind-blowing and depressing all at the same time.

The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on.  Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death.  The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s.  For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times.  There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring.  While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive.  More on that later.

There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task.  Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high.  All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches.  Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives.  He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.

It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them.  And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so.  For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story.  His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.

The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate.  This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.

As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.

On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry.  One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona.  Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one.  What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created.  But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.

Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified.  But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity.  These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda.  The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities.  This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government.  It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election.  Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.

Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent.  Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state.  And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.

A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level.  I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not.  For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.

Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face.  But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best.  Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.

My Arizona-versary

Today is my Arizona anniversary, the "Arizona-versary" of the title.  Nineteen years ago today, I completed my journey to Phoenix and officially took up residence in Arizona.

I still remember that day, July 31st, 1993.  It was a Saturday, and I woke up in a Palm Springs motel with my two cats at the time, and left early for the 4-hour drive east to Phoenix.

It was a warm morning, and the sun already felt hot as it began its climb up from behind the distant mountains.  As I left the Coachella valley for the open desert the landscape spread out in all directions, a seemingly-endless vista of burnt, sun-blasted earth in innumerable shades of black, brown, gray and beige, dotted with short, squat, desiccated shrubs and tall, stark saguaro cacti, stuck with their arms held up to the sun, as if begging for mercy that would only come in the rare years when we would have a wet, rainy springtime.  Off in the distance I could sometimes see a lone hawk or eagle, doing pirouettes in the sky as it expertly rode the updrafts and currents, spinning higher and higher in the empty azure firmament, searching for a bit of sustenance in this harsh, unyielding and unforgiving world.

The land flattened out into a broad plain as I approached the California-Arizona border and the Colorado river valley.  My entry to my new home state was marked only with a large sign on the side of the road, bidding me Welcome to Arizona and showing a cactus wren sitting in a saguaro blossom.  Almost on cue, the craggy mountains and rough, rocky hills started up again, and would remain constant fixtures for the rest of the ride.  Interstate 10 took me through Quartzite, a quirky, haphazard and confused jumble of a desert town, where double-wide trailers, recreational vehicles, and restaurants with early-bird dinner specials hold sway.  Quartzite is one of those surreal deep-desert outposts, teetering on the edge of reality, where you could come and blend into the desert and no one would ever hear from you again.  I was to learn that Arizona is full of such places - places where humans could turn into ghosts, and vice versa.

Two hours later I arrived in Phoenix and got the keys to my new apartment.  I brought the cats in and let them out of their carriers to explore their new home, and moved in the clothing and furnishings I was able to cram into my car.  The bulk of my furniture was still on the moving van, in transit from Burlingame, CA, and would not arrive for another 5 days.  I slept on an air mattress and sat on blankets and towels.  In spite of the forced austerity, it felt like home, and the cats and I were happy.

The next day, Sunday August 1st 1993, was HOT.  The high temperature was 117 degrees, something I had not even dreamed of, let alone experienced.  I walked around a little bit in the morning when it wasn't that bad, but very soon a stifling, claustrophobic stillness enveloped everything, and even the buzzing of the cicadas in the palo verde trees became quieter.  I retreated to my bedroom and laid on the air mattress, listening to the faint cooing of the native doves outside.

As I start my 20th year of living here, I think about the fact that I have spent nearly a third of my entire life in Phoenix.  Arizona is a very beautiful, diverse state, and about the only thing we are missing is the beach and the waterfront, although for the braver of those among us, Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) in Mexico has the oceanfront.  You can find mountains and cool fragrant pine forests in the north, rolling mountains and ski resorts in the east, the funkiness and rustic charm of Tucson in the south and Nogales on the Mexican border, and the bizarre surrealism of the western deserts, where the land cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be Arizona or California and keeps switching back and forth.

We have the astonishing national treasure of the Grand Canyon, truly a wonder of the world, and the turquoise-and-red-rock spiritual theme park that is Sedona.  There is also Meteor Crater, a gigantic, mile-wide hole in the ground about 40 miles east of Flagstaff, blasted out by a huge iron-nickel meteor about 75,000 years ago.  It is an amazing site and worth seeing.  It's even more amazing if you see if outside the window of a jetliner:

So many interesting things to see and do, so many charming little places to visit, like Jerome, Flagstaff and Tubac.  But there is a downside to living here, and that revolves around the political climate here.

Unfortunately Arizona is a place of extreme bigotry and intolerance.  There is prejudice everywhere, against Mexican immigrants, against Native Americans, against women, against gay people, against people who practice non-Christian religions or don't believe at all.  As is shamefully typical among extreme conservatives, if you are not a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual male, you are looked down on as being different and therefore, somehow flawed.

The state government on all levels is a total joke, rife with corrupt, hate-filled idiots and bigots who are re-elected time after time again by an electorate too stupid or uninterested to care.  This is an election year, and the local television stations show political ads over and over again ad nauseum, mostly pertaining to a senate race between a pudgy ginger asshole named Wil Cardon and a slimy-slick snake-oil salesman aptly named Jeff Flake. Both are falling over each other trying to lay claim to the title of Most Conservative candidate, they each accuse the other of doing the bidding of the Antichrist himself, Barack Obama.  In a lot of places dragging the president's name through the muck of a penny-ante pissing contest like that would be regarded as extremely vulgar and classless, but here in Arizona, nothing could be more normal or acceptable.  Or expected.

Old habits die hard here in AZ, and that innate conservatism is reflected in the voting booth.  Back in 2010 I was a poll worker for the midterm elections and was assisting an elderly woman in voting.  She was confined to a wheelchair and just getting around was a huge effort, but she proudly told me she was in her early 90s and has voted in every single election.  I thought that was wonderful until I watched her fill in her ballot, and she just went down the list of candidates and voted for whoever was a Republican.  She had no idea who she was voting for; she could be voting for Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, but she only needed to know they were Republican.  I can't help thinking that blind, knee-jerk voting like that was the last thing the Founding Fathers intended when they created this democracy.

With clueless, indiscriminate voters like that, it is no wonder that when you're elected to public office here and you're a Republican, you've got a job for life and don't have to do another single thing again if you don't want to. This predictable, party-line voting means the dumbest, most bigoted and most loathsome assholes in the state become Republicans and get sent to the state legislature and to Congress to push their extreme-right agendas.  The state legislature in particular is overloaded with fat old Nazi sympathizers and hate-filled fundamentalist Christians.  It's a little disturbing that if you're a fundamentalist Christian, man or woman, and you're only 30 years old, you look old and mean and crotchety like you're in your 80s.  Hatefulness of that magnitude makes you old and ugly before your time.

There's an old adage that goes something along the lines of, if you know someone who is crazy, quirky, nonconformist and a little off-center and they mysteriously disappear, eventually they will turn up in San Francisco.  Likewise, if you know someone who's bigoted, intolerant, mean-spirited, uneducated and filled with bile and they too disappear, they will eventually turn up in Arizona.  And probably in the state legislature.

News From Hell

The past six days have been an amazing news cycle, one of the busiest we've seen in ages.  A lot of very important stuff happened, and there was something for everybody to love and hate.

First off, last Friday the jury in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse trial came back with 45 guilty counts out of 48 charges.  The whole situation is pretty dreadful and awful, and is an object lesson in how things can get completely out of control when authority figures feel they can do whatever they damned well please and the "good ol' boy" network will shield and protect them.  Sandusky's predation on young boys is stomach-turning in the extreme, and the administration of Penn State University choosing to do nothing in the face of undeniable evidence is something they will have to answer to and pay for dearly.

One has to wonder how such horrendous abuse seemed so easy.  There has been a lot of investigation into the mindset of child molesters, and a lot of them pick occupations or endeavors that place them in direct contact with their quarry.  Sports coaches in the past have been automatically assumed to be benign and the vast majority of them are, but for the small percentage who are child predators, it provides an ideal shield and opportunity for their nefarious activities.

When I was a child, I was taught that adults were to be obeyed unconditionally and they were always right.  For me it was a fact of life that if the teacher gave you a beating in school for doing something wrong, when you got home you got another beating, because the teacher was always right, and you were always wrong.  That kind of blind, abject deference to "authority" creates the perfect climate for abuse.  It's like if a burglar comes to your home to rob it, and you welcome him with open arms and make him a nice dinner as he ransacks your house.

Sandusky will die in prison, as he deserves, but what of the lives he has destroyed with his sick activities?  There are no winners in this whole sorry situation, just pain and wreckage.

The following Monday had the Supreme Court striking down most of Arizona's hateful, racist SB1070, the draconian anti-immigration law passed in 2010, much to the delight of the bigots and hate-mongers in this wretched, godforsaken state.  Governor Jan "The Walking Dead" Brewer signed it with much fanfare, and used the resulting court challenges as a tool to raise nearly $4 million to defend it.  Even as recently as last week, when conventional wisdom indicated (incorrectly, it turns out) the Court would uphold the legality of SB1070, that dried-up old corpse was gleefully sending training materials out to police officials.  So it was particularly gratifying when the Court struck down most of the provisions of the law, and left the door wide open for future legal challenges to the part of it that was left standing.  Brewer immediately went on the news media and we were treated to the pathetic sight of that delusional, hatchet-faced old hag trying in vain to spin the ruling in her favor.  It's been obvious for a very long time that Brewer is incredibly stupid and most likely mentally disturbed, and she can add pathetic embarrassment to the very long list of reasons why she needs to go.

There was also a ruling in a Montana case which very tragically affirmed the vile, loathsome Citizens United ruling of 2010, which opened the floodgates to a deluge of corporate money into the election process.  This is plainly astonishing, as nearly everyone except the Republicans agree that the original ruling was a horrendous, horrific abomination and probably one of the very worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of this country.  As Mannequin Romney says, "Corporations are people!" and much to the detriment of this country, the Court agrees.  Another terrible, awful ruling from a Court that seems to take the side of corporations over the welfare of the American people.

Of course in the midst of all this history there just has to be some batshit-craziness, and that was provided by the witch hunt tight-assed douchebag Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca) is waging against Attorney General Eric Holder.  There was this little sting operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives called "Fast and Furious." started during the George W. Bush administration, which sought to trace firearms used by Mexican drug cartels back to sellers in the US.  They ran into a little snag due to the incredibly lax and ridiculous gun laws in (where else?) Arizona.  It seems that a couple of people plopped down $350,000 for 650 guns, got them, and just waltzed across the border to the south where drug cartels got an early Navidad, because according to AZ gun laws, there wasn't anything illegal or suspicious about a purchase that size. Now that this fiasco has blown up all over the place, AG Holder is getting blamed for everything, and the 2nd Amendment gun nuts are all bent out of shape, saying the failed sting operation is all a big scheme by the Obama administration to ram stricter gun laws down everyone's throats.  Because it's so important to be able to spend $350K on guns without some law enforcement agency asking you a lot of inconvenient questions.  Yeah, they really ARE that stupid.  They're gun nuts.

The big-deal ruling dropped this morning, when the Supreme Court basically reaffirmed the constitutionality of Obama's centerpiece Affordable Health Care Act, individual mandate and all.  There is still much to discuss and learn about this ruling, but the important take-away is that Republicans and right-wingers are crapping broken glass now, and will do so for the foreseeable future.  It is extremely gratifying to see all the right-wingers losing their shit in a very public fashion.  Anything that makes conservative right-wingers unhappy makes me EXTREMELY happy, and I have a great deal to be happy about this morning.

My Arizona Anniversary

July 31st is my Arizona anniversary, that's the day in 1993 when I moved to Phoenix from Burlingame, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have been living in Phoenix for 18 years now.

I still remember a lot about that time 18 years ago. My life in the Bay Area was kind of disintegrating; I lost my job at IBM which I had for 13 years, my roommate had passed away unexpectedly and I was starting to become very unhappy. I had visited Phoenix about a year or so previously and I loved it, and decided that there is where I would move. I didn't know a single soul in Phoenix or had a job lined up, but that didn't matter. I was going and I knew I was going to be all right.

So on Friday July 30, 1993, I packed up my two cats, Eunice and J.R., and my clothes and some personal belongings (my furniture and the bulk of everything else had been picked up by the moving van a couple of days prior) and I got in my car and headed out. The cats were in separate carriers right next to each other and knew something big was going on. They started this "meow-meow" back and forth to each other for the next 5 hours, and I honestly thought I was going to lose my mind. As I headed eastward across the San Mateo Bridge to reach Interstate 5, I took one last look at my home of over 4 years in my rear-view mirror. The fog over the coast range was a luminous white band over dark green, brooding hills. I still have that image frozen in my mind. It was one of those moments when you just knew something huge was happening to you and you would remember it for the rest of your life. There are many aspects of living in the Bay Area which I really miss, but I knew my life was elsewhere.

Cruising south on I-5 through the Central Valley was uneventful, even a touch boring. I went down what's called the Grapevine into the Los Angeles area, and that's when traffic started getting really thick. Seven arduous hours later (and the cats didn't shut up for more than 15 minutes) I decided I had had enough and found a motel in Palm Springs to spend the night. I didn't bother to mention my two cats when I checked in, since I was only staying the night. I went out for a quick dinner and a short walk around, and when I returned to the motel I saw my big black cat J.R. sitting on the window sill in front of the curtains, happily looking at everyone who passed by.

I got up early on a pleasant Saturday morning of the 31st, packed everything up again and headed east on Interstate 10 toward Phoenix. On the way I was mesmerized by the vast, empty desert around me and marveled at such names as the Chuckwalla Mountains and the Chiriaco Summit. I started to feel the heat as I passed through dusty, surreal desert outposts like Blythe, CA and Quartzsite, AZ. I got to Phoenix around noon and settled in to my new apartment. I let the cats explore their new house, and unpacked a little. My furniture would not be delivered for 5 more days, so I spent a lot of time sitting on an air mattress on the bedroom floor, looking out the window listening to the doves in the trees outside.

The next day it was 117 degrees. I went outside for a walk after lunch and thought to myself, are they kidding me? It was really HOT! The heat formed a thick blanket that muffled any sounds, and the cicadas in the trees lulled everyone into a hypnotic trance. I learned quickly that the Mexican custom of siesta, or taking a nap during the very hottest part of the day, was a really good idea.

But I settled into my new home quickly and found I really like it here. I got a job a couple of months later and that allowed me to have a very comfortable life and purchase a great house in 1995. I have been here ever since and feel that I made exactly the right move in coming to Phoenix. I have found very good friends and chosen family here, and I think things have worked out amazingly well.

There are some things I don't like about Arizona, most of all the politics here. It is an extremely conservative, Republican-oriented state, something that I really loathe since I am the exact, diametrical-opposite of that. I really detest the influence of religion in politics, both on the local and the state level. As far as I'm concerned religion is a private matter and has no business in the governance of the state. I don't begrudge anyone their religious beliefs, but when they push to codify their religious beliefs into the laws of the land and thus shove them down everyone else's throats, well I have a big BIG problem with that. I firmly believe that 99.9% of politicians in this state are corrupt morons and amoral dirtbags who really deserve to be in prison. The gun "laws" are a joke around here, and that results in incredibly stupid people and burned-out crack addicts running around here fully armed, because they think the Constitution says they can.

But most of all I hate the way animals are treated in this state, as property and "things," instead of as living, breathing, sensitive creatures meant to share the earth with us. This gives rise to the most horrific and terrible cruelties I have ever witnessed, and I believe it is impossible to overestimate the arrogance and stupidity of human beings. The human race will never be able to consider itself enlightened and civilized as long as such horrible, awful things are done to animals.

I never watch local television here because it is made by idiots, for idiots. Even more disgraceful is the local newspaper, the Arizona Republic(an), which is a laughingly provincial, unsophisticated excuse for a newspaper for the sixth largest metropolitan area in the United States. It would be more suited to a small-to-medium city in the upper Midwest rather than one of the larger cities of the Southwest. The income disparity around here is also pretty jarring, when you go from the gated communities and palatial estates of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley to the grungy, dilapidated wastelands of south Phoenix.

All these distractions aside, we do have a lot of things to appreciate, such as wonderful weather most of the year (not right now), beautiful scenic vistas, cool places to visit like Sedona and Flagstaff and Prescott and Tucson, and driving through fragrant pine forests to the visual feast that is the Grand Canyon. We also have opportunities to be dazzled by really, really dark night skies, when you think you can see a billion stars with a clarity that will literally take your breath away. As I start my nineteenth year in Sand Land, I find I really have much more for which to be grateful, rather than critical.

The Edge of Summer

It's the last weekend of May. Memorial Day comes late this year, on May 30th. It's breezy and just slightly warm outside on this very sunny Sunday afternoon, and the breezes make everything feel great. We're having a bit of a cool front come through, and we're going to fall short of the normal high temperature of 98 degrees by a good 10 to 12 degrees. We will certainly take the temporary cool spell with a lot of gratitude and will enjoy the heck out of it while it lasts, which will be all too fleeting.

Nobody is being fooled, though, by the nice weather. I've been living here going on 18 years and I know full well that another ghastly, blisteringly hot Arizona summer is waiting in the wings to crush our spirit and our will to live with its harsh, unrelenting, oppressive, choking heat. We have to put up with things that are incomprehensible to the rest of the country, such as stepping outside at 10 p.m. at night to a temperature of 102 degrees and being hit in the face with a blast of hot air not unlike sticking your head into a furnace. Or a nighttime "low" temperature of 94 degrees. You just know when you wake up at 6 in the morning and it's already 97 degrees outside that your day is going to be hell.

There will usually be at last one or two days at the end of June when the high temperature will hit 117 or even a little higher, which is ridiculously, preposterously hot. Anything over 115 degrees is unnecessary overkill, and serves no useful purpose other than to torture us. In mid- to late-July the monsoon season will start, and that is when the humidity creeps upward, making everything even more disgustingly awful that it already is. Those are days when a stifling blanket of heat covers everything and lulls you into a sleepy, hypnotic limbo, not sure if you're ever going to wake up again. And finally, during late August and early September everyone is so absolutely sick of summertime and the heat that we are ready to kill each other. Right now in late May, sitting on the Edge of Summer, we are all too familiar with what will be coming our way, and some of us are not too happy about it.

But despite the murderous, hateful aspects of our summer, there are actually some good things that happen here during June, July, August and part of September. Summertime is when we get the most colorful sunsets of the year. Because of the summer wind kicking lots of dust into the air, the sunsets are remarkably vivid and glow with unexpected and mesmerizing shades of green and purple. When the monsoon moves in it brings different layers of moisture and clouds in the atmosphere and at sunset the sky is an astonishing artist's palette of colors - crimson, deep orange, royal blue, gold, cranberry, magenta, cream and light gray. Monsoon sunsets are the best, and some of them will drop your jaw open with their magnificence.

Then there are the monsoon storms themselves. You can watch them building up over the Mogollon Rim northeast of Phoenix, in big, fluffy accumulations of storm clouds that look like immense heaps of custard in the sky. If we're lucky, these storms will collapse at sunset and come screaming down the Rim into the Valley, and then everything goes batshit crazy. Short-lived but extremely intense storms, with torrential rain, violent thunder and lightning, and near hurricane-force winds can make for an interesting, albeit hair-raising, evening. But the reward for putting up with Mother Nature's little freak-outs is a very welcome and wonderful 20-degree drop in temperature. We live for those cool, damp nights after the storm.

If we're really lucky, we will be able to watch a thunderstorm in the distance, too far away to affect our local weather, but close enough to see everything that's going on inside. It's so very interesting and beautiful to watch the distant thunderhead, made up of billowy gray clouds, being laced with lightning bolts which illuminate internal portions of the cloud bank and present a never-ending light show of bizarre shapes and colors. I remember watching one particularly beautiful round thunderhead, like a giant mushroom, flicker and flash with internal lightning bolts while being framed by a beautiful turquoise blue sky, the crescent moon and evening star. One of the most breathtakingly beautiful things I have ever seen, and completely free.

Our Mexican friends and neighbors to the south certainly had the right idea with their custom of the siesta, or afternoon nap. During the very hottest part of the day, when going outside is only something that you do when the inside of your house is on fire or there are a million dollars in the middle of the street waiting to be picked up, what better thing to do than snooze through it with a nice, long nap? The rabbits do this all the time, and I have to say it has a lot of merit.

We Arizonans will always whine and gripe about our summertimes, just as Minnesotans or Wisconsinites complain about their harsh winters or residents of southern states carp about their swamp-like humidity, but as we always do, we will get through the summer and the cool, crisp days and nights of autumn will be our eventual, inevitable reward. And as always, we will find ways to extract a little bit of fun and pleasure from the Edge of Summer.

Arizona: But It's A Dry Stupidity

I have to admit that living in Arizona these past 17 years has been a great experience for me. I've grown to love the enormous diversity and tremendous natural beauty of this state. From the intensely colored sunsets to the out-of-control summer monsoon storms that come barreling like a freight train down the Mogollon Rim straight into the valley, there is something for everyone here when it comes to weather. It is truly a miraculous sight to see the pure white of the San Xavier del Bac Mission emerging from the shimmering layers of heat and the muted colors of the desert south of Tucson; you can see my photos of the Mission on my website here. Arizona is dotted with wonderful, picturesque towns and cities like Sedona, Tubac, Jerome, Payson, Prescott and so many more. The cool, fragrant pine forests of Flagstaff on a bright, crystal-clear morning are unforgettable, as is our Wonder of the World, the Grand Canyon. The mixture of cultures, including Anglo, Hispanic and Native American influences, form an occasionally unstable but invariably rich and fascinating pastiche of art and color. An area so blessed with natural resources, history and culture must have something wrong with it, you might speculate. And you would be right.

The Republican party has held sway in this state for a long time (it seems like centuries). In the last decade it has been completely hijacked and taken over by its far-right, ultra-conservative faction, and that has shown up in Arizona state politics. A couple of weeks ago the Republican-dominated state legislature passed a law which allows anyone with a gun permit to carry a concealed firearm on their person without a previously-required concealed weapons permit. The Republicans have long been the bottom bitch of the NRA and the gun lobby so this is no major surprise. What is a bit startling is the prospect of so many badly-educated, mentally unstable people packing heat under their enormous flabby bellies. I don't feel one iota safer now that any of the meth-heads and alcoholics you see stumbling down the hot sidewalks every single day just might be hiding a pistol. But the Republicans had to bow down and pay tribute to their puppet masters in the NRA, so that's what we have to deal with every day now.

Another sideshow in this never-ending Cavalcade of Idiocy is the so-called "birther bill" making its way through the legislature. This bill would require anyone running for national office on the ballot in Arizona to present proof of citizenship. Proponents say it's needed for all office-seekers to prove they are qualified for the office, but it is a cheap, cynical and badly-concealed back-door attack on Barack Obama. The "birthers" in this country will just not give up their debunked, ridiculed notions that somehow Obama is not a U.S. citizen and has no claim to the Presidency. How sad and pathetic that the birthers still hold on to these childish notions and the Arizona legislature gets right in line behind them. This just adds to the general perception in America of Arizona as a dust-choked, sun-baked nest of batshit-crazy paranoid schizophrenics who see vast, interconnected webs of treachery and conspiracy everywhere they look.

But the biggest thing that has, in the national view, catapulted Arizona to the upper-echelon levels of mean-spirited insanity has been something called the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act," a noble-sounding but totally misleading title for SB1070, a new set of laws that give local law-enforcement great latitude and great responsibility to enforce federal immigration laws, and allows them to demand proof of citizenship from anyone in the state of whom the police feel a "reasonable suspicion" that they might be here illegally. Now exactly what this "reasonable suspicion" is, no one knows, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with having brown skin and speaking Spanish.

Opponents of SB1070 were quick to point out that it could easily be viewed as a massive infringement by big government on the personal liberties of people. You'd think that would be tailor-made fodder for the Tea Party movement, as one of their tenets is the evil, pervasive intrusion of government in every aspect of life. If so, why aren't they protesting along with all others at the State Capitol? Where are the obese, sweaty white men in stupid costumes and the senile, confused old people doddering around with their hilariously misspelled signs? The stony, deafening silence of the Teabaggers in the wake of SB1070 speaks volumes to the innate ignorance, duplicity and hypocrisy of their movement. Could it be that their strident, anti-government, all-American populism does not extend to people who came here from other countries?

No one who lives here disagrees that undocumented immigration is a huge problem. Twenty-five years ago it was considered a regional problem affecting mainly the states that share a border with Mexico. Everyone in Montana and Vermont and Wisconsin felt it didn't apply to them and thought it was something that Arizona, California and New Mexico had to deal with, and there was little pressure for Congress to come up with a national solution. Since then, everything has changed: undocumented immigrants have shown up in every state of the continental U.S., taking low-paying, labor-intensive jobs that most Americans don't want, and it has become a national security issue in our post-911 world. Recent estimates state that as many as half-a-million undocumented immigrants reside in Arizona, and this sizable fraction of the population has been criminalized by SB1070. Blame for this new law has been spewed far and wide, but the lion's share has to go to the federal government, which has completely shirked its responsibility to come up with a coherent, effective national immigration policy for so many years. Something had to be done to address the issue, but is SB1070 a overreaching, misguided attempt to do something/anything? The lawsuits and court challenges to this bill are only just beginning and this drama will be unfolding for a very long time into our future.

It's very depressing when you live here and witness so many selfish, cruel and small-minded people continually get elected to state-wide office. It seems that voters intentionally go for the most reactionary, hateful and unqualified candidate there is (J.D. Hayworth, I'm talking to you). Maybe it's due to how poorly-educated and unsophisticated so many people are in this state, or the idea that Arizona is somehow a safe haven for crackpots and crazy people from all over the country. Stupidity just attracts more stupidity - as any personal appearance by Sarah Palin will clearly show - and somehow the dumber you are, the more media attention you will receive. Normally really stupid people would be grudgingly tolerated as some unfortunate genetic consequence of human inbreeding, but when they become state legislators and start writing their mental illnesses into laws that affect us all, then they become a really big problem.