Jan Brewer Recall Possible As Arizona Collective Bargaining Has Democrats, Unions Planning Protests

Huff Post – First Posted: 02/ 2/2012  1:25 pm Updated: 02/ 2/2012  5:09 pm

By- John Celock

Arizona could become the next Wisconsin as plans for protests, Capitol sit-ins and a potential effort to recall the governor get underway in an effort by progressives to block the passage of sweeping legislation to ban collective bargaining.

State Democrats and union leaders said that plans are in place to launch Wisconsin-style measures in an effort to block the collective bargaining ban measures currently headed to a vote in the Republican-dominated Senate. Among the plans being considered are rallying large groups of public employees around the Capitol complex in Phoenix, lobbying moderate Republican legislators and potentially exploring a recall campaign against Gov. Jan Brewer (R). With Republicans’ large majorities in both legislative chambers, Democrats believe rallies and public pressure may be the only way to block the passage of the bills.

“You may wake the sleeping giant of Arizona, between attacks on the schools, unions and the Latino population,” state House Minority Leader Chad Campbell (D-Phoenix) said.

Republican lawmakers have proposed bills that would prohibit all public employees — including police and fire personnel — from collectively bargaining, ban the automatic deduction of union dues for public employees and prohibit the compensation of public employees for work done with the union. The bills were approved by the Senate’s government relations committee Wednesday.

“These bills are an all-out assault on workers and the middle class,” said Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (D-Tempe).

Arizona AFL-CIO Executive Director Rebekah Friend said the unions are currently planning the rallies, but did not give a timeframe for when the events would actually take place. She said the labor movement was prepared for the payroll deduction bill and Brewer’s previous announcements on collective bargaining, but were surprised by the scope of the current bills, including the addition of public safety workers.

“They over-reached this time,” Friend said of the state’s Republican leadership. “The people who have been their friends are against them.”

VIDEO & MORE HERE

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Brewer Pledged Cash For Immigration Fight, Instead Spent It Buying Copies Of Her Own Book

TPM Muckraker- Nick R. Martin

February  2, 2012, 11:47 AM

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) launched a special fundraising political action committee in October, pledging to use the money to fight illegal immigration and take on other issues she believes in. But based on financial disclosures filed this week, she has so far used it to do little more than buy copies of her own book.

The governor had raised only about $22,000 for Jan PAC by the end of 2011 and spent nearly a quarter of the cash buying books from Amazon and paying a bill at the luxurious Waldorf Astoria hotel in Orlando, Fla. The rest of the money is still in the bank.

Brewer spent $3,423 on books and shipping from the online retailer, according to the financial reports. On her fundraising website, she offers a signed copy of her book “Scorpions for Breakfast” to every donor who gives $100 or more.

In early December she also spent $624 for a night at the swank Waldorf Astoria in Orlando, which her financial disclosures repeatedly misspell as “Orlanda.” Another $513 went to airfare on Southwest Airlines.

A message left for representatives of Jan PAC was not returned.

In October, the governor launched the PAC with several goals: fighting illegal immigration, defeating the president’s healthcare plan, creating jobs and reducing the size of government.

The financial disclosures represent a time before Brewer’s now famous encounter with President Obama on an airport runway in Phoenix last week. Sales of “Scorpions for Breakfast” spiked on Amazon after the event and the governor used her renewed notoriety to encourage people to donate to Jan PAC.

Among the donors revealed in the financial disclosures were former US Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who lives in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria and gave $250, and wealthy real estate developer Mike Ingram, who gave $1,000.

Brewer’s final term as governor ends in 2014 and she has not said whether she plans to run for another office after that.

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Brewer Signs Bill Making Colt Arizona State Gun

Jan Brewer Signs Bill Making Colt State Gun

04/28/11 08:32 PM ET  

PHOENIX — Arizona’s governor has signed a bill designating the Colt Single-Action Army revolver as the state’s first official firearm.

Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill without comment on Thursday. Legislative supporters argued that the designation was appropriate because the revolver was widely used during Arizona’s territorial days.

Opponents say it was inappropriate to give the official designation to an out-of-state company’s commercial product. Colt is based in Connecticut.

Democratic Rep. Albert Hale also says the gun was an instrument of destruction that was used against Native Americans.

SOURCE

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AZ Gov. Jan Brewer Vetoes The Birther Bill

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AZ Gov. Jan Brewer Vetoes The Birther’s ‘Show Us Your Penis’ Bill

Crooks and Liars- By Susie Madrak

April 19, 2011 07:00 AM

I have to give Jan Brewer credit: She came up to the edge of the abyss, and pulled herself back. Maybe there’s some hope for Arizona’s governor:

PHOENIX — Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has vetoed a bill to require President Barack Obama and other presidential candidates to prove their U.S. citizenship before their names can appear on the state’s ballot.

The bill vetoed by Brewer on Monday would have made Arizona the first state to pass such a requirement. According to My Fox Phoenix, the governor said the measure “is a bridge too far.”

The AP reported last week on the legislation:

The Arizona proposal would require political parties and presidential candidates to hand in affidavits stating a candidate’s citizenship and age and to provide the candidate’s birth certificate and a sworn statement saying where the candidate has lived for 14 years.
If candidates don’t have a copy of their birth certificates, they could meet the requirement by providing baptismal or circumcision certificates, hospital birth records and other documents.
“I never imagined being presented with a bill that could require candidates for president of the greatest and most powerful nation on earth to submit their ‘early baptismal or circumcision certificates’,” said Brewer in light of vetoing the bill, according to My Fox Phoenix. “This measure creates significant new problems while failing to do anything constructive for Arizona.”

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Arizona Governor Signing Death Warrants?

Arizona Budget Cuts Target Potentially Life-Saving Care For Transplant Patients

Reuters- via HuffPost

First Posted: 03/ 6/11 07:05 PM Updated: 03/ 6/11 07:05 PM

PEORIA, Arizona (Reuters) – A pacemaker and defibrillator fitted to carpenter Douglas Gravagna’s failing heart makes even rising from the couch of his Phoenix-valley home a battle.

But it is not congestive heart failure that is killing him, he says. It is a decision by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to stop funding for some organ transplants as the state struggles to reduce a yawning budget deficit.

“She’s signing death warrants — that’s what she’s doing. This is death for me,” says Gravagna, 44, a heavy-set man who takes 14 medications to stay alive.

Gravagna is among 98 people denied state Medicaid funding for potentially life-saving transplants and at the forefront of a harrowing battle over the state’s public finances.

The measure enacted last October by Brewer trimmed spending on Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program, to help close a projected 2012 budget deficit of $1.15 billion.

It eliminated coverage for transplants including lung, heart, liver and bone marrow after weighing the success and survival rates for certain transplant procedures.

MORE HERE

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Arizona Governor Mocks Bloomberg For Arizona Gun Show Undercover Investigation (VIDEO)

Jan Brewer Mocks Michael Bloomberg For Arizona Gun-Show Sting (VIDEO)

The Huffington Post Nick Wing
First Posted: 02/ 3/11 05:19 PM Updated: 02/ 4/11 09:00 AM

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) hit back at New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week, suggesting that his undercover sting to expose lax Arizona firearms laws was an indication that he thought he’d already taken care of business at home.

“I find it interesting that he’s out here in Arizona solving our problems,” Brewer said in an interview on Fox News. “I guess he believes that he has solved all the problems in New York.”

The governor went on to explain that Arizona was a “big Second Amendment state,” and that she supported the current version of its firearms laws, a line similar to one she took in the immediate aftermath of the video’s release earlier this week.

Brewer then seemed to argue that both individual patrons, as well as merchants, should be working in conjunction to ensure that firearms laws were enforced.

“Those people that buy guns from private owners at a gun show have the responsibility, if they knowingly realize it, someone cannot pass a background check or if they suspect that maybe they are mentally incompetent, it is a state felony and a federal felony,” she said.

VIDEO And MORE HERE

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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer Admits She Was Wrong About Beheadings

Jan Brewer Admits She Was Wrong About Beheadings

PAUL DAVENPORT and AMANDA LEE MYERS | 09/ 4/10 04:11 AM | Via: Huff Post

PHOENIX — A claim by Arizona’s governor that rising violence along the U.S.-Mexico border has led to headless bodies turning up in the desert came back to haunt her during a stammering debate performance in which she failed to back it up.

Gov. Jan Brewer, who gained national attention defending the state’s tough new immigration law and warning of increasing border bloodshed, has spent the time since the gubernatorial candidates’ debate earlier this week trying to repair the damage done from her cringe-worthy contest against underdog challenger Terry Goddard.

“That was an error, if I said that,” the Republican told The Associated Press on Friday. “I misspoke, but you know, let me be clear, I am concerned about the border region because it continues to be reported in Mexico that there’s a lot of violence going on and we don’t want that going into Arizona.”

She said she was referring to beheadings and other cartel-related violence in Mexico in comments she made earlier this summer about decapitated bodies found in the state’s southern region.

Brewer’s candidacy caught a big break in April, when she signed a controversial new state immigration law that put local police officers on the front lines of enforcing federal immigration law. At the time, Brewer’s primary campaign faced serious challenges, but signing the bill cleared her path to what proved to be an easy primary win on Aug. 24.

Brewer stumbled through her opening statement of the debate Wednesday. She lost her train of thought for more than 10 painful seconds as she laughed, looked down at the table and finally regained her composure.

Goddard, who trailed by 20 points in a July poll, said he brought up the beheadings comments because Brewer hadn’t acknowledged she was wrong.

“It’s a kind of fear-mongering that has hurt our economy. It has driven jobs away,” he said. “She wouldn’t come off it.”

Brewer apparently first referred to beheadings during a June 16 interview with Fox News, talking about “the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings and the fact that people can’t feel safe in their community” in discussing controversy surrounding the immigration law.

MORE HERE

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Brewer Falsely Claimed Immigrants Beheaded People In Arizona (VIDEO)

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R)

Brewer Falsely Claimed Immigrants Beheaded People In Arizona (VIDEO)

TPM MUCKRAKER

Rachel Slajda | July 1, 2010, 6:43PM

When defending her highly criticized immigration law, Gov. Jan Brewer (R) often lists the myriad problems she says undocumented immigrants bring to her state. In an interview on Fox News last week, for example, she claimed: “We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings …”

There’s no better way, it seems, to make the case for strict anti-immigration laws than to claim that undocumented immigrants are pouring into the country to decapitate innocent Americans.

Brewer nonetheless stuck by the claim that undocumented immigrants are murdering Arizonans when asked about it last weekend on a local Arizona political show.

“Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert, either buried or just lying out there, that have been beheaded,” she said.

The anchor notes that he couldn’t find “any beheadings in any kind of news search.”

Watch:

The Arizona Guardian followed up, asking the state’s county coroners — who would examine any body connected with a crime — if they’d seen the headless bodies from the desert .

They hadn’t.

(Although one coroner, gruesomely, told the paper they did sometimes get human skulls– but not as a result of a fatal beheading. Such skulls are found after people die in the desert and “the animals … get a hold of them and start moving their body parts around,” the coroner said.)

Asked for comment, a spokesman for Brewer told the Guardian said the governor had never said anyone was beheaded inside Arizona. “I’m not aware of any statements where the governor specifies where any crimes were committed,” he said. On the contrary, he claimed that Brewer was talking about the fear that crimes that occur in Mexico could spread to Arizona.

“That report, which is based on other news reports, suggests that the drug cartels who operate on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, have not beheaded their victims,” the spokesman, Paul Senseman, told Politico. “Even a cursory check of news stories on the internet suggests otherwise.” Perhaps his boss should have done one before appearing on news programs to make such a claim.

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Arizona Immigration Law Conjures Ghosts of Southern Neo-Slavery

The violation was known as “vagrancy.” If you were a black man in the South following Reconstruction, and you were unable to show proof of employment on-demand to the police, you could be arrested and delivered into what Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, calls “Neo-Slavery.”

“Show me your papers” in the vernacular of the late 19th Century through World War II involved furnishing pay stubs or, if you were lucky, the word of your employer — some kind of evidence proving to a police officer that you were employed.

But what if you forgot to carry your employment records with you when you left the house that morning? What if you were — like so many regular citizens — unaware of the anti-vagrancy law? Hell, what if you were simply unemployed? It might be your last mistake as a free citizen of the United States.

Like so many other African American males of that era, you might be incarcerated, convicted and perhaps sold to a farming, mining or lumber operation. Yes, sold. After the Civil War. After the abolition of slavery and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery, it turns out, survived.

In the Spring of 1908, a young African American son of slaves living in Alabama named Green Cottonham was arrested at a train station. We don’t know for sure what law Cottonham had violated to warrant his arrest because, at his trial, the arresting officer literally forgot the reason why Cottonham was picked up in the first place. So the charge of vagrancy was substituted. Cottonham convicted and sentenced to 30 days of hard labor, but since he was poor and couldn’t pay several intentionally impossible-to-pay fines, the 30 day sentence grew to a year. He was carted off and “legally” sold for $12-a-month to U.S. Steel. At age 22, Green Cottonham was shoved into a coal mine as a manual laborer — occasionally whipped and tortured, eventually dying before the end of his sentence.

Vagrancy and a wide variety of other similar violations were intentionally broad and trivial — not intended to clean up the streets, but, instead, to suppress the advancement of blacks, as well as to feed the engines of agriculture and industry in the South with cheap forced labor.

This was a back-door slave trade, ensnaring hundreds of thousands of African American men. The Southern judicial system, fueled by ridiculous laws and ridiculous trials, became an above-boards means of rebuilding the South on the backs of slave labor. And it flourished until just after Pearl Harbor when President Roosevelt asked the Justice Department to shut it all down for fear the Germans and Japanese would use it against us in their propaganda.

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Gov. Jan Brewer Signs Controversial Arizona Immigration Bill

Gov. Jan Brewer Signs Controversial Arizona Immigration Bill: Decision Not ‘Made Lightly’

PAUL DAVENPORT and JONATHAN J. COOPER | 04/23/10 07:08 PM | AP

PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer ignored criticism from President Barack Obama on Friday and signed into law a bill supporters said would take handcuffs off police in dealing with illegal immigration in Arizona, the nation’s gateway for human and drug smuggling.

With hundreds of protesters outside the state Capitol shouting that the bill would lead to civil rights abuses, Brewer said critics were “overreacting” and that she wouldn’t tolerate racial profiling.

“We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act,” Brewer said after signing the law. “But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation.”

Earlier Friday, Obama called the Arizona bill “misguided” and instructed the Justice Department to examine it to see if it’s legal. He also said the federal government must enact immigration reform at the national level – or leave the door open to “irresponsibility by others.”

“That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe,” Obama said.

The legislation, sent to the Republican governor by the GOP-led Legislature, makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It also requires local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants, allows lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws, and make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly transport them.

MORE HERE

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