Though it's now about a month old, there's an excellent article in the New Republic about what's wrong with the border wall. For a right-of-center magazine, they do a good job of laying out all the important points, and conclude that "Most experts on all sides of the immigration debate agree that the border fence is a political band-aid for a larger policy problem." Another great quote at the end that they cite, from Cecilia Mu

A couple weeks ago I posted about a local struggle between the forces of grassroots human rights and the forces of corporate-media-backed racist/sexist/xenophobic hatred. This is just a quick update to mention a couple things: first, recall that hate-jock "Jon Justice" made some horrid little videos in which he molests a giant pinata/sexdoll of Garcia. The schmuck took down the videos after he realized how damning they were, then his employer got YouTube to remove the re-posts that Derechos re-uploaded to YouTube, on copyright grounds. Well, now they've reposted them again to a different site that apparently isn't caving in as easily to such specious legal threats. The 2 vids are here and here. They are also embedded on a post from local progressive blog, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." In fact they seem to be reposted so many places that Journal Broadcasting will probably have trouble censoring them all. There are also transcripts of the 2 videos and other information on the Derechos site.

I also wanted to point out a few other references to this conflict, like a recent post on Feministing that mentions the situation, and cites some great feminist bloggers' analyses of the DJ's hate acts, saying it better than I could. And the Phoenix New Times' Feathered Bastard, known for regularly frying Sheriff Arpaio and other local facists, blogged expertly about it. I like how he refers to the hate-jock as "Jon Just-An-Ass."

Also worth griping about is the regularly worthless (except for the comics and Savage Love column) Tucson Weekly's coverage of the story - they mentioned it twice the week it started (in the editor's first-page babblings, and longer blurb further in), and once again the next week, and in all 3 instances, 3 different writers all used the phrase "paraded around" to describe what Garcia did with the Arpaio pinata head. The Weekly's take on the story is somewhat neutral, not really taking sides too strongly, their point being that everyone involved was just being kinda silly (oh except that John Hoffman, another schmuck from the talk-radio world who apparently works with the Weekly's racist asshole-in-residence Tom Danehy, said in his "guest commentary" that Garcia was being "tyrannical." Huh?). Besides the use at all of the rather un-objective, connotative term "paraded" you have to wonder about the repeated use of that exact same wording. Was there a staff meeting at the Weekly where dumbshit editor Jimmy Boegle told everyone to always use "paraded"? Were other words like "walked," "marched" or "ambled" tried by the other 2 writers and discarded by the proofreaders as being not inflammatory enough (I've seen the video they keep mentioning and I think any of those other terms, amongst a host of others, would be accurate to describe Garcia's actions)?

Or maybe all the authors associated with the rag are just lazy? Well, at any rate that's 4 more pieces of evidence (3 for each instance and 1 for the repetition) in my ongoing case that the Tucson Weekly is a hopeless piece of trash.

Well, folks, in case anyone still doubted it, the new border wall planned for Texas is literally becoming a reality as of a couple weeks ago. The physical start of this sad and ludicrous atrocity (which, even more saddening, is already pretty much done here in Arizona) is in Mission, Texas. Tireless border activist Jay Castro has put up a bunch of photos from there, of a first protest against this first bit of Texas wall. He also has an impressive collection of shots from all over the rest of the border.
Apparently there's also construction started in Granjeno, Texas on the combination levee-wall project, the corrupt deal that Hidalgo county made with DHS.

Tucson author Charles Bowden, expert on the border, the drug war, and the southwest environment, has been busy lately - He's coming out with a new book called "Exodus," about the immigration situation, and an article in Orion magazine is a sort of abstract of it, apparently (the same title also graced an article he did for Mother Jones a couple of years ago that touched on a lot of similar points). His basic point, in a word, is that immigration is unstoppable (which reminds me of a quote from someone interviewed in yet another documentary about the border wall, the trailer of which I viewed yesterday: "imagine someone built a wall between you and your bank. You'd find a way to get to your money.").

He also appears in, of all places, the latest issue of GQ, where he summarizes the recent drastic upswing of violence, from horrible to hellish, in Ciudad Juarez, thanks to Presidente Calderon's new, bloody, but useless war on Mexico's narcos.

The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent

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Unconventional Denver, the group of radical activists that has been organizing protests against the Democratic National Convention this September, has issued an offer, which contains the best idea I've heard of in a while regarding this upcoming act of political theater and associated protest theater: They're offering to "call off all protests during the convention if the city, federal government and the DNC agree to redirect the current $50 million earmarked for heightened security during the DNC and invest it in Denver communities."

What a great concept! Better yet, how about calling it off ANYWAY, and using the money you WOULD have spent on bus tickets, gasoline, spraypaint, sign materials, pot, beer, cool activist t-shirts, black hoodies, black bandanas, etc, and funnel THAT cash into Denver communities, and/or your own communities if you plan on travelling to Denver from afar?

And wouldn't it be hilarious if all the riot pigs showed up armed for a superrumble, and the streets were completely empty? Wouldn't the city feel stupid for spending that 50 million?

But no, you'll probably go ahead and run around the streets chanting and yelling and dancing and sewing new patches on your Carharts, and give our overlords all a reason to make people feel so glad that they spent that money on more guns and tear gas. A win-win situation: the rulers get to point at another excuse for strict security measures, and y'all get another huge summer street party and formative experience.

Rock on, everyone!

A local shock-jock bigot, Jon "Justice," from local hate radio station 104.1 "The Truth" has started a feud with Isabel Garcia and Derechos Humanos, an immigrant-rights group in Tucson that took part in a big protest against racist, fascist sheriff Joe Arpaio a couple of weeks ago when Arpaio appeared at a book signing.

(in)Justice has initiated a campaign to get Garcia fired from her day job as Pima County defender. In turn, Derechos has started a grassroots effort to get advertisers to drop their support of the radio station. The pendejo DJ even did a horrible video in which he harassed and molested an effigy of Garcia on camera - it's so offensive I can't even watch the whole thing. Then he tried to hide this evidence by taking the video offline, but Derechos managed to save it and repost it.

Derechos asks everyone to continue the so-far quite successful fight to notify advertisers of the hate-filled broadcasts that their advertising dollars are supporting.

A point was made by Mr. injustice in a later video that his antics with the Isabel Garcia pinata were the same as what the kids at Barnes and Noble did with the pinata of Arpaio, but this is simply not true. The simple and ritualized beating-in-effigy of a public figure, a brutal cop who has terrorized, killed and tortured hundreds of people, is perhaps admittedly a little crass and a poor choice of tactics, but that kind of demonstration is is an accepted and somewhat traditional form of protest, quite different from the creepy and sexualized symbolic abuse of a latina woman that this white racist DJ has performed for his racist gabacho fans. And despite his denials, he understood this, too late, that this was the case, and tried to hide it. He must be punished.

Al Gore gave a speech the other day about global warming and called for making the nation's energy use 100% renewable in the next 10 years. Right on.

Gore has been so exemplary, it makes me wonder what would have happened if the 2000 election had gone a little differently and he had been put in the White House like he lawfully should have been. Probably the demands of being a more political animal would have made it impossible to concentrate on the issue of global warming, and quite plausibly the world's wake-up to the problem may have been delayed for x number of years. So it may have been for the best, in the long run, that he was not president, ironically.

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 09:44 so tired of people not understanding that youtube videos are not "usable", you can't "take" them and do anything with them. and even if you could they wouldn't be high-enough quality for pro use. sigh. #
• 14:16 copying old wtr footage from old drives to the new one #
• 20:13 just watched a datura blossom open. beautiful. #

Although we have yet to pick our copy up from the post office, I just read about the cover of the new issue of the New Yorker and the ensuing controversy over it. It's amazing that anybody smart enough to read the New Yorker would not get the joke, and speaks to an old problem that an old friend of mine and I used to joke about and call the "Irony Deficiency" of our nation.

This particular instance of this condition made me realize a possible fundamental cause - the fact that our society is so diverse, so factionalized, and so polarized and full of hate and adversarial relations, that irony is almost impossible on a mass scale - why do I say that? because when you have a population in which some people truly believe what others consider are outlandish jokes, those jokes start to backfire if they spread into the realm of the believers.

Those who would normally laugh at such a joke are on such hair-triggers to defend against the attacks of the believers that they no longer have a sense of humor. The fact is that there are some people who are so naive, hateful, deluded, and/or stupid that they really think that Michelle Obama is a violent radical militant and Barrack is a muslim terrorist. That's just how wide, how separated by chasms of clashing belief and values, the spectrum of "political" dialogue, spectrum of opinion about what is real and true, has become in this country.

And who should be surprised, when there are some people that watch 6 hours of television a night, including FOX News, and others that never watch TV at all and spend those hours reading Noam Chomsky, Harpers, or the New Yorker (and/or the latest Crimethinc publication)? When there are some that listen to Merle Haggard and pump their fists earnestly when he sings "and I'd surely stand up, next to you" or whatever, in that stupid-ass song about the first Gulf War, and yet there are others, like me, who bike around town with songs like this stuck in our heads, a Cop Shoot Cop track from that same era:

It's okay to kill in the name of democracy
And dictators are swell if they like the smell of American money
It's making me sick, I want no part of it
Stop waving that flag
All you idiots bought right into it
And who's left holding the bag?
Surprise, surprise. Surprise, surprise.
The government lies.

Which, by the way, if you didn't get it, contains irony in the first 2 lines...

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 09:14 hating, at least in a way, getting invites to art and music events in cities thousands of miles away. i guess a little disgruntled at tucson #
• 09:15 wondering if i have enough real twitter friends to stop following rex sorgatz.... #
• 17:18 why does everyone shoot widescreen now? and yet all the frames (like on youtube) are still 3:2