Do You Live in Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Apache Junction or Queen Creek and Want to Get Rid of Pesky Right-Wing Congressman Jeff Flake?

Use your head - and shoulders - and write in Richard Grayson in the August 24 Arizona Sixth Congressional District Green Party primary.

That's the best way to get this extremist career politician Flake out of your hair.

President Ronald Reagan: "I Believe in Amnesty" for Undocumented Aliens

We congratulate our opponent, Rep. Jeff Flake, for being the only Republican member of Congress to attend President Obama's speech on immigration last week at American University. Rep. Flake has taken an unpopular stand in his reactionary party, and he should be commended for it. Of course, he's in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, who did more to give amnesty to the undocumented among us than any American leader in our history. In a 1984 debate, President Reagan forthrightly states, "I believe in amnesty."

So do we.

AZ-06 Republican Congressional Primary: Jeff Flake vs. Jeff Smith = Vampire Edward vs. Werewolf Jacob

The choice facing voters in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District in the August 24 Republican primary between Jeff Flake and Jeff Smith is like the choice between Jacob and Edward in Twilight.

Like that vampire-vs.-werewolf rivalry, the AZ-06 primary is a choice for morons created by a moron.

For Arizona's working families, it means: Do they want the blood sucked out of them by a congressman with the work ethic and compassion of a corpse or to be violently attacked by a dopey werewolfish corporate lackey?

It's twilight for America, no matter who wins.

The real question, of course, is what a member of Congress can do for average people who want the competence both Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson sadly lack as actors.

We can summarize the contest for the AZ-06 Republican primary by substituting the names of the clueless candidates for the wooden actors in a leading movie critic's review:

Jeff Smith seems to have recently escaped from a high school cheerleading squad somewhere while Jeff Flake’s right-wing pouts convey the peevishness of a guy who just lost a Greta Garbo lookalike contest — for the third time in a row! — to his own girlfriend.

Feckless Fanatic Congressman Jeff Flake Calls for "More Pain" for America; Entrenched Arizona Politician Wants New Great Depression to Balance Budget

Today at a Capitol Hill news conference, Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake called on Americans to endure "more pain" and "a new Great Depression" in order to reach his goal of a balanced budget.

"Americans, and Arizonans, have not really suffered at all during this so-called recession," Flake told reporters. "Balancing the federal budget is something we have to do immediately. That's why I've voted twenty-three times against bills that would spend money to help those admittedly unfortunate Americans who've lost their jobs or are facing minor financial difficulties like not being able to afford probably uneccessary spending on items like junk food and needless medical care."

"I'm proud to have voted a total of seventeen times against increasing or extending unemployment benefits, which is a wasteful social spending scheme," Flake replied in answer to a reporter's question asking how the Congressman felt about Arizona's maximum weekly unemployment benefits, third lowest among the states, recently going down to $216 from $241. "The unemployed need to value the free market a bit more and pull in their belts."

"I had no problem surviving a week with no money at all on a desert island for a week," Rep. Flake said, "so I think everyone collecting unemployment benefits or other unnecessary government benefits like food stamps, Medicare or Medicaid need to be a little more self-reliant like me."

Flake derided commentators like Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman who've said that imposing financial austerity can cause a new Great Depression. "Maybe we need a new Great Depression," the Congressman told reporters. "It would help voters see that they've been living off the government teat for too long."

Corporate Lackey Congressman & Oily Politician Jeff Flake: Another GO(B)P Apologist for British Petroleum

It's interesting that with all the Republican members of Congress condemning Texas Rep. Joe Barton for his apology to British Petroleum for the U.S. government "shakedown" (haha), there's been only silence from Arizona's laissez-faire fanatic Rep. Jeff Flake, who's never voted once to help the needy but who's voted over 75 times for tax breaks for corporations like BP, which he shakes down to fill his bloated campaign coffers. As Blog for Arizona points out, Jeff Flake is a member of the Republican Study Committee which, even before Joe Barton's comment, also apologized to BP as it called the escrow account "Chicago-style shakedown politics."

That's because extremist Jeff Flake agrees with Barton's lunatic misguided groveling. He's never seen anything government can do right, and he's never seen anything a domestic or foreign corporation can do wrong - even when its gross negligence or willful misconduct (attested to by its own corporate partners) creates an unprecedented disaster with unparalleled suffering, like the one BP's oil spill has caused in the Gulf. Jeff Flake would prefer to keep his fellow long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge of the corrupt and incompetent Minerals Management Service. (See the Rolling Stone exposé of Bush and Obama administration misfeasance.)

Rep. Jeff Flake was shrewd enough to make his apology to British Petroleum in private. Until we hear otherwise, we'll assume that this corporate lackey congressman agrees that BP is the real victim in all of this. Check out his record as a Big Oil lackey on energy issues.

Jeff Flake. Out of touch. Out of control. Maybe even out of his mind.

When it comes to foreign corporations like BP, Jeff Flake is one oily ("excessively servile or obsequious") guy.

But this politician's fat-cat-backed career trajectory is running out of gas.

* * *

For an intelligent non-corporate perspective on the issue, far removed from that of the fanatic Flake, check out this blog post, "Oil Spills and Real Change," by our friend Rev. Billy,

last year's Green Party candidate for New York City Mayor.

Ghetto-Fabulous Russell Pearce vs. the U.S. Constitution, Round Two

We see that the neo-Nazi-hugging, undereducated state legislator Russell Pearce is up to his old unconstitutional tricks again and thought we would reprint this blog post from December 5, 2007, when we also were running for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District (we withdrew after others entered the Democratic primary):

The provocative insider Republican blog Seeing Red AZ reports that term-limited State Rep. Russell Pearce (R-National Alliance) has abandoned his exploration of a candidacy in the primary against U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District. This anti-government activist, of course, will be running for a different public office rather than moving to honest work in the private sector that right-wingers adore.

So right now nothing stands between Jeff Flake and yet another term of do-nothing showboating on behalf of his extreme laissez-faire anti-middle-class philosophy but me.

Scary, huh?

But there are rumors that things might change soon. Stay tuned.

Although I revere the United States Constitution, I am far from being an expert on it. I managed to get only a B+ in Prof. Fletcher Baldwin's Constitutional Law I class in the spring of 1992 at the University of Florida College of Law although I did somehow get an A in both Prof. Charles Collier's Constitutional Law II class that summer and in Prof. Baldwin's Civil & Political Liberties class that fall.

I did just a little work involving constitutional issues as a staff attorney in social policy at UF's Center for Governmental Responsibility and spent only one year as a visiting professor in legal studies at Nova Southeastern University, where I taught just two undergraduate sections each of Constitutional History I, Constitutional History II and Political & Civil Rights.

And while I did supervise teaching assistants in Constitutional Law for three years at Nova Southeastern's Shepard Broad Law Center, I admit that my knowledge of the Constitutional might not match that of the ghetto-fabulous Russell Pearce, who is, after all, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives and presumed candidate for the same seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for which I am running.

But I would respectfully suggest to Russell Pearce that he take a look at the first sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens, but the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified a couple of years later, enshrined that in our Constitution.

In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court held that under the Fourteenth Amendment, a child born in the United States of parents of foreign descent who are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under a foreign power, and are not members of foreign forces in hostile occupation of United States territory, becomes a citizen of the United States at the time of birth.

According to the Wong Kim Ark decision, the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had to be interpreted in light of English common law tradition that had excluded from citizenship at birth only two classes of people: children born to foreign diplomats and children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country's territory. Since Mr. Wong, who was born in the U.S. to parents who were not citizens -- and who never could become U.S. citizens due to the racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 -- didn't fit in these two categories, he was a U.S. citizen.

U.S. citizenship law since Wong Kim Ark has acknowledged both jus soli (citizenship through place of birth) and jus sanguinis (citizenship inherited from parents). While the Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled on whether children born in the United States to undocumented (so-called "illegal") immigrant parents are entitled to birthright citizenship via the Fourteenth Amendment, it has generally been assumed that they are.

In some cases the Court has implicitly assumed, or suggested in dicta, that such children are entitled to birthright citizenship.

In Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), the court stated in dicta that illegal immigrants are "within the jurisdiction" of the states in which they reside, and added in a footnote that "no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment 'jurisdiction' can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful."

And in INS v. Rios-Pineda 471 U.S. 444 (1985), the Court referred to a child born to deportable aliens as "a citizen of this country."

This leads me to respectfully suggest to Arizona Rep. Russell Pearce (R-National Alliance) that his bill to take away citizenship from children born in this country, like the proposed Arizona referendum to accomplish the same thing, is patently unconstitional.

I further respectfully suggest that when Russell Pearce claims that the Fourteenth Amendment "has nothing to do with aliens," he is full of shit.

Well, Mr. Pearce is still pretty scary, even if he backed away from what have would been a humiliating defeat by Jeff Flake in the 2008 Republican primary for Congress. In most civilized parts of the country, a Russell Pearce would be widely considered an embarrassing laughingstock. Too bad Arizona is so backward that Pearce and his slimy ilk actually are in charge of the legislature and that the poorly-educated moronic majority of voters of the Cactus State seem to want to keep their own kind in power.

Richard Grayson Green Party for Congress AZ-06 Campaign "Vigorously Opposed" by Conservative Republican Local Blogger Telemoonfa

The well-known local East Valley conservative Republican blogger Telemoonfa today has posted a letter to his (or her) readers viciously attacking the congressional candidacy of the Green Party's Richard Grayson in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, calling him "psychopathic." Here is the opening and the end, but you should read the whole post to understand this commentator's reasons for opposing us:

Dear Readers,

So there’s a psychopathic Green Party guy masquerading as a legitimate politician named Richard Grayson. I wish I could tell you that Richard lives in Hollyweird, or in Communist Cuba, but the truth is, he’s very very close to us...

Oh, that Richard Grayson...I vigorously oppose him!

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa

P.S. Let me ask you a serious question, Richard Grayson. Why are you running for office? I think you’re crazy, and I think your party’s crazy, and I think you have no chance of winning, so I don’t know why you’re running. Why don’t you just become a Democrat and try to make the Democratic Party Greener? That’s the sensible thing to do. (Oh wait, actually the really sensible thing to do would be to become a conservative Republican.)

P.P.S. There's no way I can endorse you, Richard Grayson! You're running against Jeff Smith, and I endorse Jeff Smith!

Apparently Jeff Smith is running against Congressman Jeff Flake in the August 24 Republican primary.

We tried to get a photo of Telemoonfa to illustrate this post, but if you type "Telemoonfa" in the Google image search engine, it shows results for Telemundo. We would rather be opposed by Telemoonfa than Telemundo.

Richard Grayson Super-Official State-Certified Candidate for Congress in Green Party Primary in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District

Blog for Arizona's Craig McDermott is reporting

Richard Grayson of Apache Junction has filed as a Green

for the Congressional seat currently held by Republican Jeff Flake in CD6. As no other Green candidates have yet filed for the seat, Grayson needs 221 votes

in August's primary to qualify for the general election ballot (221 is the number of sigs he would have needed to appear on the primary ballot).

A look at the Arizona Secretary of State's listing of all candidates in the August 24 primary confirms this.

As House Votes Contingent Repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Backwards Jeff Flake Marches the Wrong Way

Yesterday, in a very belated correction of decades of discrimination, the House voted for a contingent repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, finally recognizing that the sexual orientation of American military troops is irrelevant to their ability to serve our country.

Rep. Jeff Flake voted no. As we've seen earlier this week, often when only a handful of Republicans are in the minority, Flake will be with that outlier group. But yesterday he didn't have the courage and good sense of Ron Paul and the other four Republican House members who stood up for decency.

As Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut, and a sponsor of the companion Senate bill, noted:

The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy doesn’t serve the best interests of our military and doesn’t reflect the best values of our country. Bottom line: thousands of service members have been pushed out of the U.S. military not because they were inadequate or bad soldiers, sailors, Marines or airmen but because of their sexual orientation. And that’s not what America is all about.

Of course, out-of-step radical politician Jeff Flake has never understood what America is all about.

Veteran-Hating, Dog-Despising Jeff Flake Votes Against the Veterans Dog Training Therapy Act as U.S. House Passes Bill, 413-4

There's nothing Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake hates worse than veterans - except if it's dogs. So Rep. Jeff Flake must have taken great pleasure

in casting one of only four "no" votes on Tuesday when the House passed the Veterans Dog Training Therapy Act, which provides funding

to carry out a pilot program for assessing the effectiveness of addressing post-deployment mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms through a therapeutic medium of assistance dog training and handling for veterans with disabilities.

You know, training service dogs is believed to currently be helping to address symptoms associated with post-deployment mental health conditions in our vets, and this bill would expand these pilot programs. Service dogs are already helping our vets with physical disabilities, of course.



But did I forget to say that haughty veteran-hating, dog-despising Jeff Flake also has only contempt for people with disabilities? So this was a trifecta for the fanatical anti-family radical wacko who represents you, the voters of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District.

Or maybe - if you're a normal person - he doesn't, and it's time for a change.

Veteran-Hating Rep. Jeff Flake One of Only Two House Members to Oppose Bill to Help Vets

Yesterday H.R. 5145, the Assuring Quality Care for Veterans Act, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 413-2. Who was one of the two congressmen opposing quality medical care for the men and women who fought to protect our country? The unpatriotic Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District.

This is not the first time veteran-hating Jeff Flake has shown his contempt for patriotic servicemembers. He must be replaced in November by someone who understands that we need to keep our promise to the men and women who have served America.

Federal Subsidies for Child Care for Working Mothers Must Be Increased; Now, Welfare Reform in Arizona Only a Broken Promise

Today's New York Times has a lead story, set in Tucson, on how a lack of funding has resulted in "swelling numbers of low-income families struggling to reconcile the demands of work and parenting, just as they confront one of the toughest job markets in decades," especially in states like Arizona:

Able-bodied, outgoing and accustomed to working, Alexandria Wallace wants to earn a paycheck. But that requires someone to look after her 3-year-old daughter, and Ms. Wallace, a 22-year-old single mother, cannot afford child care.

Last month, she lost her job as a hair stylist after her improvised network of baby sitters frequently failed her, forcing her to miss shifts. She qualifies for a state-run subsidized child care program. But like many other states, Arizona has slashed that program over the last year, relegating Ms. Wallace’s daughter, Alaya, to a waiting list of nearly 11,000 eligible children.

Ms. Wallace abhors the thought of going on cash assistance, a station she associates with lazy people who con the system. Yet this has become the only practical route toward child care.

So, on a recent afternoon, she waited in a crush of beleaguered people to submit the necessary paperwork. Her effort to avoid welfare through work has brought her to welfare’s door.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” she says. “I fall back to — I can’t say ‘being a lowlife’ — but being like the typical person living off the government. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to use this as a backbone, so I can develop my own backbone.”

As the American social safety net absorbs its greatest challenge since the Great Depression, state budget cuts are weakening crucial components. Subsidized child care — financed by federal and state governments — is a conspicuous example.

“We’re really reneging on a commitment and a promise that we made to families,” said Patty Siegel, executive director of the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network, an advocacy organization. “You can’t expect a family with young children to get on their feet and get jobs without child care.”

Here in Tucson — a city of roughly 500,000 people, sprawling across a parched valley dotted by cactus — Jamie Smith, a 23-year-old single mother, once had subsidized child care. That enabled her to work at Target, where she earned about $8 an hour. She paid $1.50 a day for her 3-year-old daughter, Wren, to stay at a child care center. The state picked up the rest.

She was aiming to resume college and then find a higher-paying job. But in December, she missed by a day the deadline to extend her subsidy. When she went to the state Department of Economic Security to submit new paperwork, she learned that all new applicants were landing on a waiting list.

Ms. Smith sought help from Wren’s father to look after their daughter. But he had his own job delivering pizza, limiting his availability.

“Some days, I’d just have to call in sick,” she said.

By March, she had missed so many days that Target put her on a leave of absence, telling her to come back after securing stable child care, she said.

Without the state program, she sees no viable options.

She, too, is contemplating going on welfare.

“It’s a blow to my own self-image and self-worth as a person who can take care of myself,” she says. “I’m totally able, physically and intellectually, to continue working. But I can’t work without child care, and I can’t afford child care without work" . . .

At least nine states, including Illinois and Indiana, used increased federal aid through the stimulus package to begin offering child care support to parents looking for work. Thus they expanded the case loads of such programs or lengthened the duration of the benefits, according to data compiled by the National Women’s Law Center, an advocacy group in Washington.

But at least nine other states, including Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts and North Carolina, have cut access to subsidized child care programs or the amounts they pay. . .

In Arizona last year, stimulus funds prevented budget cuts that would have eliminated care for 15,000 eligible children. But as the budget crisis has ground on, the state has added names of eligible children to the wait list, a term that social service agencies deride as a euphemism.

“It’s really a turn-away list,” says Bruce Liggett, executive director of the Arizona Child Care Association, a Phoenix-based advocacy group. “The program has been shut down.”

For Mr. Liggett, this amounts to a bitter turn. In the mid-1990s, he was a deputy director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, where he helped put in place the new welfare-to-work program.

“We’ve seen devastating cuts,” he says. “For those families working to stay off welfare, we’re denying help. Welfare reform in Arizona is certainly a broken promise."

Family-hating Rep. Jeff Flake has never lifted a finger for Arizona's working families and never will; it's against his fanatical laissez-faire anti-government principles.

He must be replaced with someone who will make sure proper funding for child care subsidies is restored so that Arizona's moms and dads can get back to work and support their families.

Richard Grayson - Green Party - for Congress AZ-06 Supports DREAM Act and Student Demonstrators at Senator McCain's Office

We'd like to offer our support to the brave young people sitting in at Senator John McCain's Tucson's office -- Tania Unzueta, Lizbeth Mateo, Yahaira Carrillo, Mohammad Abdollahi. Raúl Alcaraz -- four of whom were arrested yesterday and three of whom face deportation because they are undocumented.

The students support the DREAM Act, a bill that would offer legalization for illegal immigrant students who were brought to the United States as children by their parents. We support the DREAM Act, and if elected to Congress, we will sign on as a co-sponsor and vote for it.

As a college teacher in Arizona, Florida and New York since 1975, we've taught students from more than one hundred countries -- currently we're teaching students from Mexico, Mali, Myanmar and Montenegro, and that's just the M's! -- and of course their immigration status is none of our concern except that we want to make sure all have the right to continue their education without any problems.

Since this is not some bullshit highly-political attack-dog campaign, we'd like to commend the incumbent Republican representative in AZ-06, Congressman Jeff Flake, who met with Arizona Dream Act Coalition last year and promised to vote for the bill.

We've got a lot of problems with Jeff Flake's votes and positions, but he's correct - and like the brave students, pretty courageous since he's the member of a state political party whose raison d'etre seems to be immigrant-bashing - to support the DREAM Act. It's the right thing to do.

* * *

Today's New York Times has an article on the first national news page, "A Generation Gap Over Immigration," which highlights the same age divide on the immigration issue that we see on gay rights:

In the wake of the new Arizona law allowing the police to detain people they suspect of entering the country illegally, young people are largely displaying vehement opposition — leading protests on Monday at Senator John McCain’s offices in Tucson, and at the game here between the Florida Marlins and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Meanwhile, baby boomers, despite a youth of “live and let live,” are siding with older Americans and supporting the Arizona law.

This emerging divide has appeared in a handful of surveys taken since the measure was signed into law, including a New York Times/CBS News poll this month that found that Americans 45 and older were more likely than the young to say the Arizona law was “about right” (as opposed to “going too far” or “not far enough”). Boomers were also more likely to say that “no newcomers” should be allowed to enter the country while more young people favored a “welcome all” approach. . .

The generation gap is especially pronounced in formerly fast-growing states like Arizona and Florida, where retirees and new immigrants have flocked — one group for sun, the other for work.

In a new report based on census figures titled “The State of Metropolitan America,” Mr. Frey found that Arizona has the largest “cultural generation gap,” as he calls it, between older Americans who are largely white (83 percent in Arizona’s case) and children under 18 who are increasingly members of minorities (57 percent in Arizona’s case).

An accompanying chart shows the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metro area ranking #1 in the gap between children who are white and of residents over 65 who are white. The Tucson metro area is tied for #2.

In Phoenix, only 44% of kids are white; in Tucson, only 39% of kids are white. But in Phoenix, a whopping 85% of seniors are white; in Tucson, 79% of seniors are white.

The great news for Arizona: All of these bigoted baby boomers and xenophobic geezers will be dead sooner than later!

¡Adios, Russell Pearce!