Put on your best sheets—the GOP rides tonight.

Jane Brewer, the Grand Wizard in Arizona, also known as the governor, has come out with the most absurd statement of her campaign yet.

You must understand that Brewer was doing quite poorly in the polls because she had pushed through some major tax hikes, during a recession when people couldn't afford it. Republicans hate taxes, except when they get to spend the money. But the rank and file Republican was unhappy and Brewer's poll numbers took a nose dive. In response Brewer decided she only had one drum left to beat that would rally the party faithful to her side: hatred for immigrants. So she started crowing about the brown menace. Her poll numbers approved among Republicans who are quite willing to forgive tax increases provided you are hateful enough.

Brewer has now claimed that the majority of immigrants coming into the U.S. without bureaucratic permission slips "are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in." This is better than it could have been. She might have alleged they were under the control of the Learned Elders of Zion. She claimed: "The majority of them in my opinion, and I think in the opinion of law enforcement, is that they are not coming here to work. They are coming here and they're bringing drugs. And they're doing drop houses and they're extorting people and they're terrorizing the families."

Previously this geriatric Barbie doll claimed that undocumented workers were putting Arizona under a "terrorist attack" by coming in.



Brewer just makes this shit up. Yet, as you will see below, she simply claims "we all know" that immigrants are all drug dealers. All blacks are lazy, all Jews are cheap, all gays molest children, all blonds are stupid, all women are bitchy, all sports players are dumb, etc.. Folks get out your best sheets the GOP rides tonight!



I am very opposed to violence, especially violence against women, but I can't say I would have been too upset if someone bitch-slapped the old moron, just hard enough to knock off a couple of inches of the make-up.

The head of the union that represents border guards says that the experience of border agents doesn't correspond with the racist remarks of Brewer. T.J. Bonner said, "The majority of people continue to come across in search of work, not to smuggle drugs. Most of the drug smuggling is done by people who intend to do that. That's there livelihood.

Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat, said that Brewer "does not understand the difference between illegal immigration and the organized criminals who are members of the violent drug cartels who pose a very real danger." False, Brewer ad her fellow Republicans do know the difference, but this is campaigning and you scare the public in order to secure votes. So, while they know the facts, they prefer to lie, the truth is not politically advantageous.

The Republican klavern seems to ignore the reality of the war on drugs. It is the illegality of drugs that creates massive profits and massive drug smuggling. Every so-called victory in confiscating drugs merely pushes up the market price making it more profitable to smuggle drugs and thus encouraging the very thing they wish to stop. In this sense drug smuggling is like socialism, the more of it you have the more counter-productive it becomes.

If there has been one clear tactic of the Republican Right in Arizona it has been to purposed conflate the results of the war on drugs with immigration. But then Republicans are wrong on both counts.

And this brings us to the Washington Post basically forcing David Weigel out of his post as a blogger about Right-wing politics. Privately Weigel had post remarks about the rampant bigotry in the American Right today. He said it more strongly but it reflected things he has said publicly all along. Some Right-wing web sites took the remarks and claimed this proved that Weigel was biased and demanded his firing. Of course, he is biased—just like every god-damned reporter on the planet, including the conservative ones. There is NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVE REPORTING.

I don't like Weigel, I don't like his writing and I don't care for him as a person. I have read his descriptions of events I witnessed and thought he did a piss-poor job of getting his facts straight. He once put words in my mouth that hadn't come out of my mouth. I stopped reading him because I didn't like his style and didn't trust his "facts."

But, what put the Right into a frothing, foam mass of hysteria was that Weigel called them bigots. For once Weigel gets his facts straight and he's punished for that!